


The Cold is Lost, Forgotten

by pagination



Category: Inception (2010), Mysterious Skin (2005)
Genre: Child Abuse, Crossover, Drinking & Talking, Dubious Consent, Friendship, M/M, Past Abuse, Pedophilia, Recovery, Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 08:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pagination/pseuds/pagination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the third one of these get togethers they’ve done, despite Arthur’s hostility to the idea and Eames’s lazy mockery. Mostly it’s Ariadne’s fault. A lot of things are these days. She has the tenacity of a dental drill, without the same precision of damage.</p><p>“Because we’re <i>friends</i>,” she says on the phone when she first proposes it, in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary.</p><p>Done for this Inception kink meme <a href="http://inception-kink.livejournal.com/20822.html?thread=50473302">Prompt</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a crossover between Mysterious Skin and Inception. It involves non-graphic discussion of child abuse, pedophilia, and contains situations in which a main character engages in self-destructive sexual behavior, as well as the off-stage suicide of a character. The story itself swings wildly between humorous and dark. Please heed warnings!

 

* * *

Of course Ariadne brings cheap boxed wine and scarves for everyone. She claims they're home-made party kits in the tradition of the Greeks. Never mind the outrageous bottles Saito had delivered by hand-truck to the presidential suite, which say as much about the Japanese attitude towards alcohol as they do about his sardonic affection for them as a group.

“You need to have something to drink after you get through the good stuff,” she tells Dom with no shame whatsoever. 

“Those champagne bottles are bigger than you are. You’ll die if you finish one.”

“Then you can use the boxed wine to pickle me and bury me in an empty. I’ll be a gorgeous corpse.” Ariadne kisses him on the cheek before adorning him with a purple scarf. “Isadora Duncan rides again.”

Dom recalls Mal telling him about Isadora Duncan — namely, about how her scarf got cozy with the rear axle of her car and _strangled her to death_ — but Ariadne’s happy, Yusuf’s grinning, and Eames and Arthur haven’t arrived yet, so he hooks his finger between the silk and his skin and just smiles weakly.

* * *

 

It’s the third one of these get togethers they’ve done, despite Arthur’s hostility to the idea and Eames’s lazy mockery. Mostly it’s Ariadne’s fault. A lot of things are these days. She has the tenacity of a dental drill, without the same precision of damage.

“Because we’re _friends_ ,” she says on the phone when she first proposes it, in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary.

“We’re not friends,” Dom says. 

“You love me.”

“I like you.” He’s willing to concede that much. “You’re a talented architect. If you stay in dreaming, you’ll have a great career.”

“See?”

“That’s not the same thing as friendship, Ariadne.”

There was never any real hope that she'd listen to him. Through no planning whatsoever, he’s conditioned her to ignore his emotional judgment. “Eames is coming. So’s Yusuf. Arthur won’t come unless you come, so I’m saving him for last. Do it for him.”

“What does Arthur get out of this?” Dom asks, puzzled, and Ariadne says, _“_ Friends, obviously,” as though that should have been clear from the get-go, as though the entire idea of an Inception team reunion is simply to make sure Arthur has a support network in his post-Inception, post-Cobb life.

“Arthur doesn’t need friends.” 

“Everybody needs friends.”

“Not Arthur.” 

“He doesn’t _have_ friends, you mean. Since you’re not in the business anymore, and poor Arthur is all alone now." Her reproach doesn't even pretend at irony. 

“There’s nothing ‘poor’ about Arthur.”

“Maybe not in the financial sense.” Ariadne’s grim, like she’s a doctor handing the bad news to the patient’s next-of-kin. 

Dom can’t think of any circumstance in which Arthur could be considered _poor_ Arthur, and is about to say so, but she isn’t finished. “Besides. You owe me.”

At heart, Dom has the instincts of a fair man, though he’s made a wildly successful career out of ignoring them. He listens to them now, against his better judgment. Showing Ariadne the spiderweb crack of guilt where Arthur is concerned will only draw a bullseye for her to hammer a crowbar through later. But.

“How did you get Eames and Yusuf to agree?” he asks, already resigned to the inevitable.

She hears his capitulation. There’s triumph in her: “Bribed them.”

“How?”

“I said the _entire_ Inception team. How do you think?” she demands, then hangs up before he can remember the last, honorary member, and change his mind.

All five of them get together for the first one. They spend the first hour circling each other like the planets of a hostile orrery. There are unpleasant reminders of how Dom managed to earn their mistrust, and old corpses dug up from past jobs that would have been better left buried. Barbs fly like bullets until Saito’s alcohol and Ariadne’s ruthless peacemaking transforms the threat of war into something warily cordial.

The experience isn’t pleasant enough to lure Dom to the next one, but he comes anyway when summoned six months later, beaten down by Ariadne’s persistence. Arthur isn’t there, off the grid on some long-running extraction job that's bleeding horrific rumors out of Hong Kong — “I swear he planned it that way. He’s not getting out of it next time,” Ariadne says, a fierce snap to her voice that bodes ill for the absent point man — but the others are there in force. Saito’s doing again, his motives unfathomable behind a cryptic, cynical little smile. Dom surprises himself by enjoying it.

He doesn’t argue with her the third time. 

“Arthur’s going to be there. He promised,” Ariadne says, even though Dom didn’t ask.

“I thought he was in Luanda.”

“He’s in Jo’burg on a job. The extractor brought Eames in to forge, apparently. He spent fifteen minutes bitching about him— he really likes him, doesn’t he? I told you this would work.”

Ariadne hangs up before Dom can complain about her reckless abuse of pronouns, leaving him confused about who likes whom and finding either scenario equally improbable.

It’s impossible not to grow close to people you’ve been through the fire with, even if they’re completely unbalanced like Dom; even if they look like they should be nice but are really _not_ , like Ariadne. Yusuf likes everybody and has the moral center of a doughnut. It’s impossible not to grow fond him, even if you can’t trust him; and Eames? He’s a complete tosser, but he has a way of getting under your skin. 

As for Arthur, well. Nobody gets close to Arthur but Dom, though it isn’t for lack of trying. Shared knowledge of secrets aside, Dom’s not convinced Arthur really _likes_ him all that much, if he ever did. It’s hard not to take it personally when someone’s subconscious kept targeting you for torture. Dom’s honest enough with himself to know exactly why his projection of Mal hated Arthur so much.

Unfortunately, Arthur has had more experience than most with unhappy truths.

* * *

 

Arthur is the last to arrive at the suite, unusually late. His punctuality is not usually reserved for professional occasions, but here it is, 8:15, and the door opens to—

“Eames?” Dom says, surprised, before peering past him for the point man.

“I was invited,” Eames reminds, his grin benevolent.

“I was expecting Arthur,” Dom explains, adding unnecessarily, “He’s late.”

“If it’s late, then you should be expecting me, shouldn’t you?” Eames says, and saunters past him to accept Ariadne’s rapturous hug and Yusuf’s friendly greeting with equanimity. “Nice scarf.”

Dom doesn’t blush, but he does take the scarf off, reminded.

“I got one for you, too,” Ariadne promises Eames, then snatches a laugh out of the air when he spins her in approved ballroom fashion to send her crashing into one of the suite’s couches. 

“Saito coming?”

“God,” says Yusuf with a wince, under Ariadne’s regretful, “He wanted to come, but he had a thing.”

“Thing?”

“You know—” One close-bitten hand waves airily, conjuring fantastical menageries from empty space. “A billionaire thing. Saving the manatees or buying up a third world country or something. No, wait. It was some event with ... _minshuto_? Does that sound right?”

Dom and Yusuf stare at her. Eames is too busy fondling bottles and decanters in an obscene way to notice. 

“What?” Ariadne demands. “We’re friends. We talk all the time.”

“About _what_?”

“I have opinions on things. He finds me refreshing.”

Yusuf mumbles something that gets him pinched by vengeful fingers, while Dom looks at his watch and then at the door, dissatisfied. A tardy Arthur oversets his understanding of basic physical law. 

He’s the one who finally says, “I should look for Arthur,” with his totem twitching between his fingers.

“No need to get antsy. He’s coming,” Eames says.

Yusuf waggles his eyebrows at Eames and gets a shard of ice flicked at him. “Not like Arthur to be late.”

“I saw him on the way,” Eames says into his bottle. He grins again, easily, loosely. “He’ll be here.”

* * *

 

Arthur arrives like a ghost, absent one second, here the next. Dom’s face, increasingly squashy in a way more reminiscent of pugs than worry, immediately relaxes. Ariadne is the only one who makes a fuss, but she refuses to be intimidated by Arthur’s level glare, so he’s forced to accept a hug, a scarf, and a kiss on both cheeks in that order.

Not that they’d be stupid enough to admit it, but everyone’s a bit disappointed that the addition of jaunty floral chiffon to his ensemble makes Arthur look stylishly dangerous rather than ridiculous.

“You lost the hat,” Eames says, his face falling ludicrously when he emerges from the bedroom.

Ariadne’s eyebrows rise, insinuating volumes. “Is that a euphemism?”

“An actual hat,” Arthur says. 

“He was wearing one,” Eames explains.

“I didn’t lose it.”

Eames says sadly, “It was a fedora. He was lovely in it."

“You’d be a great Frank Sinatra impersonator,” Ariadne decides, while Arthur studies Eames, the faintest of frowns on his face. When he finally says, “I gave it away,” Eames mimes theatrical shock, leaving uncertain whether he’s more surprised at the admission of a personal act, or at the concept of Arthur being generous.

“To somebody cute?” Ariadne wants to know. “Or to a homeless person in desperate need of fashion?”

“‘In desperate need of fashion?’” Yusuf echoes.

“It’s a real thing. Look at Eames.”

All eyes turn to Eames, who slouches pointedly at them all, comfortable in his lurid purple paisley, orange Ariadne scarf, and shiny olive slacks. 

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” Eames challenges.

Arthur’s mouth relaxes.

“Oh my God,” says Ariadne, her face crumpling. She clings to Arthur’s arm. “Help.”

“I don’t do lost causes anymore,” Arthur says, small creases deepening at the corners of his eyes.

It’s lovely, really. When Arthur really smiles, he has _dimples._

“You should’ve kept the fedora,” Eames laments, while Ariadne buries her face in Arthur’s shoulder and shakes with giggles. “I was planning to have so many fantasies around that hat, you have no idea. I was going to imagine you in my bathtub, covered in bubbles, wearing nothing but that hat. Or I could have borrowed it. I met a gorgeous little elf boy tonight with blue and silver hair, studs all down his ears—” 

He doesn’t finish his thought, because Arthur’s face suddenly loses all expression. It’s his version of a warning rattle (a terrifyingly steep learning curve for neophytes in dreamshare). 

Eames might push his luck to the precipice, but there are too many things in the room that could be turned into a weapon, and the distance between that blank-faced warning and bone-splintering violence is the breadth of a whisper. 

“Was it something I said?” he wonders, his smile sprawling bright and wild.

“Jesus,” says Ariadne, feeling the sharp crest of tension through the arm she’s embracing. She steps away to peer up at Arthur. “It’s just Eames.”

“Drink?” Dom asks. He pushes a half-filled glass into Arthur’s hand. 

Arthur blinks, stony gaze relaxing, and the moment passes. 

The stories about Dom and Arthur have more to do with Arthur taking care of Dom rather than the other way around. There’s a flip side to that coin that only a few in dreamshare realize. Eames, because he studies people, learns people, is one of them. From the way Yusuf’s eyes are growing rounder, he’s just become another.

”Phillipa ordered me to show you the video of her ballet recital,” Dom says with absent-minded apology, the parabola of his stroll drawing Arthur away in a conversation that neatly cuts Eames out.

Ariadne wanders over to Eames, claiming his arm in place of Arthur’s. “What the fuck was that about?” she whispers up at him. “He’s touchy tonight.”

Eames, staring after Arthur, lifts his shoulders in a careless shrug. “Haven’t a clue,” he lies. He grins down at her. “Do you really kiss your mother with that mouth?”

* * *

 

Two drinks down, Arthur removes the suit coat. Three drinks down, he rolls up his sleeves. 

Sometime between drinks five and six, he’ll loosen his tie. The rest of the gang has learned to gauge the temperature of acceptable social risk by the barometer of Arthur’s _deshabille_. Until then, they make their best guesses about what will escape Arthur’s wrath, and prepare to dive for cover if they’re proved wrong. It’s a heady game, if more painful than most. If they weren’t a little addicted to adrenaline, they wouldn’t have entered the business to begin with.

“Never Have I Ever?” Eames suggests from his sprawl on the floor, and Dom says, “Fuck, no. I’m not playing that game.”

“Why not?” Yusuf’s contribution, from the sofa where his lap is playing pillow to Ariadne’s feet. “I don’t mind. How do you play it?”

“Someone says something they’ve never done, and everybody who’s done it takes a drink.”

“Sounds easy.”

“Until the alcohol poisoning, which leads to death.” Dom is firm on this subject, even knowing he will be accused of being stuffy. On cue, Eames gives him a pitying look.

Ariadne, her head propped on the arm of the settee that she has claimed as her throne, lifts her glass into the air to declaim, “Never have I ever had a threesome.”

She watches with interest while Eames and Yusuf gleefully drink; then raises her eyebrows at Dom when he grudgingly takes one, too. Leaned against the wall of the on the far side of the room, behind Ariadne and Yusuf’s sofa, Arthur silently does the same. 

“Now I just feel left out,” Ariadne says sadly. “Never have I ever had a _foursome_.”

Dom announces, “I’m _not_ playing this,” while Yusuf sips, Eames throws back another drink and grins, showing all his teeth. Something in his expression shifts, then; out of the corner of his eye, Dom watches Arthur take another drink. 

Yusuf stretches to bump fists with Eames, whose eyes flicker back to Arthur, distracted.

“I like this game,” Yusuf announces.

“I’ve been doing college all wrong,” Ariadne laments.

“We’re not playing this,” Dom says again, pressing the point because alcohol poisoning is _bad_.

“I can take it!”

“I’m not worried about _you_.”

Ariadne protests, “I’ve had experiences.”

The other four exchange glances. 

Ariadne rolls her eyes. “Oh, please.”

“Believe me,” Dom says, while Yusuf grins, and Eames says brightly, “Never have I ever been in a sexual situation involving a goat.”

Yusuf sputters, “You _twat_. I _knew_ I shouldn’t have told you—” 

“Bottoms up, mate.”

Dom looks pained. “You won’t be able to do much drinking, is all I’m saying, Ariadne.”

It’s an argument that plainly sways her. Her eyes widen indignantly, then narrow. “Just how slutty _are_ you guys?”

“Oh, pet,” Eames says almost fondly, and a few seconds later, Arthur says, “Yeah, let’s not.” So they don’t.

* * *

 

Eames could fill a book with everything he knows about Arthur. It would be a short book, but it would be a beautiful one: the sharp peaks of his collarbones; the graceful curves of his hands; the uncompromising set of his mouth; the shallow sine wave of his spine. 

The words would be terse and to the point, because it would be a book about Arthur, rather than a book about Eames. Eames loves words of any language; loves the way they roll across his tongue, making fantasy and shapes and dreams even without the benefit of a PASIV. He paints with words. If it was a book about Eames, it would be rich poetry and lines of prose that wrap around each other, getting increasingly smaller until the naked eye couldn’t read them.

A book about Arthur would be all about the whitespace, the stories between the words. Bulleted lists. Facts. 

Fact: Arthur is widely acknowledged as the best point man in the business.

Fact: once you’ve earned his loyalty, there is nothing Arthur will not do for you. There are no limits.

Fact: when he’s on a job, he hides no less than five guns with extra clips, and two knives in various places around the hotel or apartment he’s taken.

Fact: attempting to enter a private bathroom while Arthur is within, even if he’s just brushing his teeth, will result in immediate violence. The kind that leaves scars.

Fact: there are no rumors of Arthur ever having a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone, either inside or outside of dreamshare. By the same token, his sexual preferences are completely unknown.

Fact: Eames occasionally wanks off to fantasies about Arthur: rumpling his suit; baring smooth, pale skin; tasting him, opening him, taking him apart until he’s nothing but shocked sounds, helpless pleas, and desperate, writhing need. 

Fact: Eames is fairly sure he doesn’t stand a chance, but he dearly, but _dearly_ loves a challenge.

* * *

 

The alcohol Saito provided them is good. Damn good. His motives may be incomprehensible and, if placed under scrutiny, possibly terrifying, but he deserves all six toasts they give him before Arthur starts forcing Ariadne and Dom to drink bottles of water between glasses of champagne.

Dom, who has been cowed into preemptive submission by a year on the PTA, only puts up token resistance. Ariadne perversely gets drunker on the water than she did on the booze. 

“Worst sex experience,” she says without warning, dropping the subject like a rock in the middle of a conversation about who the fuck knows what. Jungian archetypes or something.

Eames asks promptly, “Mouth, hands, or penetration? Giving or receiving?”

“Everything. Anything. Overall. With a _human being_ ,” she clarifies.

Yusuf chuckles. “You’re fixated on my goat story.”

“It was a _goat_.”

“It was ornamental. It wasn’t mine, anyway.”

“Why do we have to talk about sex anyway?” Dom asks, and is completely ignored by everyone except for Ariadne, who decrees vindictively, “You first. _That’s_ what you get for criticizing my great ideas.”

Dom brightens. Sadly, the alcohol he’s been guzzling has had the worst possible effect on his judgment. Once upon a time, he was a badass legend in criminal circles, but now he organizes bake sales in between extractions; what’s left of his dignity wears a pretty floral bonnet and cries into its Chardonnay during late night reruns of Desperate Housewives. 

Halfway through his story, he visibly realizes that it was a really bad idea to share this one, because it isn’t just the worst sex experience the rest of them have ever heard; it’s also the most embarrassing. 

“Aw. That was so _sweet_ ,” Ariadne says when he’s done, her eyes warm and damp. 

Arthur and Eames eye her, while Yusuf demands, “Why the hell would you tell us that story? My balls have crawled back up into my body.”

“You asked,” Dom says lamely. 

“Mal tied you up, wrapped your meat and two veg in saran wrap, dropped you off naked in front of a biker bar— and she thought that was _funny_?”

Arthur says with nostalgia, “I miss Mal.”

In a rare moment of harmony, Eames says wistfully, “God, so do I.” 

* * *

 

Yusuf’s worst sex story is mercifully free of farm animals, though there’s a malicious parrot with an eidetic memory that makes an appearance. Eames’s story is in the plural form — stories — which, _a la_ Sheherezade, chain one into the other until his audience is left wondering why he doesn’t just give up and take a vow of chastity. Ariadne’s story rouses Yusuf’s haphazard fraternal instincts; he enthusiastically volunteers Eames and his old uni mate, apparently named Spider, to break the culprit’s legs.

“Or I can just hire Arthur,” Yusuf suggests.

“I don’t do intimidation,” Arthur says.

“Yes you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You’re doing it right now. See? There you go. You just did it again.” Arthur frowns at Yusuf, who lifts a defensive arm. “And _again_.”

Eames grins into his glass. “Leg-breaking isn’t intimidation, Arthur. That’s the step before you get physical. Once you get to broken bones, you’ve gone straight to punishment.”

“I do punishment,” Arthur decides, as though there were any doubt.

“Darling. Say that again. It made me shiver all over in the best possible way.”

Arthur rolls his eyes. Ariadne, tipsy enough to be single-minded, is busy furrowing her brows over the earlier conversation. “If the step before is— and the one after, you know, punishment. Then. Wait, what step is when you just shoot someone in the head?” 

“Absolution,” Arthur says.

“You’re a sick fuck,” Yusuf says, face warming with appreciation. They drink a toast to Arthur.

From worst sex experience they hop to funniest, which in Yusuf’s case involves yet another accidental animal — “I’m detecting a theme here,” Ariadne says when she’s able to breathe again, her face blotchy with oxygen deprivation — and in Dom’s case is decreed nowhere near as satisfying as the gift-wrapped dick tale.

Ariadne threatens to throw up from laughing halfway through Eames’s story, which wins a quiet chuckle from even Arthur. Ariadne’s story, by comparison, is more sweet than hilarious, involving her first time. It’s her wry commentary on the event that makes them laugh.

It takes no prompting from that point to go around the room again on stories about first times. 

“Well, Mal—” Dom begins, winning eyerolls from half the room and smirks from the other half.

 _“_ Really? You saved yourself for marriage?” Ariadne flails on the sofa, trying to sit up to stare at Dom. “Oh my God. Arthur. Arthur. You were totally right. He really _is_ a unicorn.”

Dom glares. Arthur shrugs, not even bothering to look apologetic. 

“No, really. Really.” Yusuf yelps as Ariadne crawls across him, planting her hands wherever is most convenient for her progress. Mostly, this seems to require his face. “That’s precious. How old were you? Twenty? Twenty-five? Thirty?”

“Mal wasn’t my first,” Dom protests, harassed. 

“Liar!”

“She wasn’t!”

“You manwhore!”

“Seventeen,” Dom says, subsiding under Ariadne’s disappointed glare, and Eames’s subsequent laugh. “I didn’t meet Mal until I was twenty-four.”

Yusuf says smugly, “Fifteen.”

“Fourteen,” from Eames, raising his eyebrow at Dom’s snort. “I was mature for my age.”

“What about Arthur?” Ariadne demands, letting her head loll back so she can peer around the settee at the point man. 

“What about Arthur?” asks Arthur, leaned lazy and untouchable on the other side of the room, wall to his back, all exits covered. His face is flushed with the alcohol, finally, and he’s down to his waistcoat now, his tie a sleek ribbon around his shoulders. Ariadne’s upside-down face wins a real, unguarded smile; his dimple materializes for a split-second, teasing them, then disappears. 

Ariadne squirms, rolling over onto her side to rest her chin on the arm of the settee. “Watch where you’re putting that foot,” Yusuf complains without heat, wincing as it digs into his groin, but she’s already on, “You’re being awfully quiet.”

“Drinking,” Arthur excuses. He lifts his bottle to show them. 

“Liquid courage. You haven’t said _anything._ We’re sitting here, showing all our dirty laundry—”

“Or in Dom’s case, his waterproofed testicles,” Eames interjects. 

Arthur’s mouth twists. “Nothing to say.”

“Worst sex experience?” Ariadne prods.

Arthur shrugs.

“Funniest?”

Another shrug. Ariadne’s eyes narrow dangerously. “How old were _you_?”

“I knew it. He’s still a virgin,” Eames gloats, purely for the principle of the thing. Arthur’s lips thin.

“How do you figure?” Yusuf asks.

“Anybody who dresses in that many layers is hiding something.”

“Weapons?” Yusuf suggests, which Eames isn’t ashamed to admit is a good point. Also, quite a turn-on.

The subject temporarily derails the conversation. There’s nothing overt about it, but by now they’re familiar enough with Arthur to be aware of his faint relief. Eames’s persistent curiosity is equally clear, so no one is surprised when he returns to the topic with unabashed directness when Arthur has displayed to Ariadne’s satisfaction at least two of the knives concealed on his person. 

“I just don’t see how it’s any of your business how old I was when I started,” Arthur retorts.

Eames demands, brightly, “But how much sex, really?”

“Again, none of your goddamn business.”

“But we’re sharing, Arthur. This is what friends do. We _share_.”

“We’re not friends, Eames.”

“Arthur,” Ariadne says reproachfully. “We’re all your friends. Don’t make that face. I saw that face.”

“I’ve had a lot of sex,” Yusuf says, stepping hastily in front of Arthur’s retort, while Ariadne wrinkles up her nose and retrieves her foot from Yusuf’s lap with, “I don’t want to hear about any other animals.”

“I love a nice deflowering,” Eames says as provokingly as he knows how, his eyes half-lidding and the tip of his tongue sliding across his lower lip. He leers at Arthur. “If you ever fancy an experienced lover to pop your cherry—”

There’s an, “ _Ew_ ,” from Ariadne, while Dom’s smile falters and dies as he meets Arthur’s eyes. There’s a curious tension under the mirth that sputters across the room. Arthur’s shoulders are settling into tight, braced lines. 

“I’ll have you know I’m much in demand with virgins,” Eames says with great dignity.

Ariadne lifts her head off the settee in an impatient puff of breath. “Come on, Arthur. It’s just a question, geez.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I’m just _curious_ —”

Yusuf stirs, his hands curling into uneasy question marks at Arthur’s expression, “Ari.”

“It’s the sounds they make that I like. Everything’s new to them. It’s lovely. And the way they spread their legs and _writhe_ —” Eames says with relish. 

Ariadne buries her face in a pillow to wail, “Oh my _God_. I’m never going to have sex again. _Eames!_ ”

“Does anyone want to try this brandy?” Dom asks a little too loudly, a little too pedantically to be convincing. “Saito had it sent over. It’s got to be at least forty years old. Yusuf? Arthur?”

“—and the way they shiver and beg me when I work my way in and coax the little dears into their first—” Eames is saying, when a muscle jumps in Arthur’s jaw and he snaps,

“Fuck you, Eames. Eight, alright? I was eight.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

The way Eames and Arthur first meet is like this.

Eames has a job in San Francisco, which he’s two days late for. The extractor’s name is Parrett, and he’s a son-of-a-bitch in the ways that Eames appreciates the most. He’s had a couple bad jobs out of the handful he's done for the extractor, but he's always been paid and never been shot, which is more than he can hope for from some extractors; so when he gets a call late one night in Mauritius, he picks up the phone and says yes without a thought.

He arrives at the rented office that’s been set up as their base to find Parrett and the chemist, a placid Samoan named Israel, already in possession. Signs of habitation are already evident on the four desks behind the reception area. In a new twist for Parrett, the only unused desk is already set up with Eames's preferred equipment. Pencils, sketch pads, fashion magazines; even the yellow gummy erasers he loves but can only find in Hong Kong. It’s an attention to detail — an attention to _Eames_ , specifically — that Eames hasn’t experienced yet in dreamshare.

He stuffs all six of the erasers in his pocket because waste not, want not, and blows Parrett a kiss. 

Parrett shakes his head, disclaiming responsibility. “Arthur.”

“Your new point man?”

“He’ll do,” Parrett says, answering the unspoken criticism instead of the question. 

It’s early in Arthur’s career; he’s yet to do the De Beers job, which will make his reputation, or form his partnership with the Cobbs, which will make him a legend. All Eames knows of him is his first name — common enough, if associated with a weedy type ill-equipped to deal with the physical demands of the role — and what vague rumors have come his way.

“He’ll drive you crazy,” the architect told Eames on the job before this one, her dark eyes narrow with amusement and anticipation. “I wish I could be there when you meet.”

“Parrett wouldn’t hire a complete incompetent, love,” Eames had said, and Sunita had laughed, settling her chin on his bare chest to say cryptically, “That isn’t the kind of crazy I mean.”

In the here and now, the new point man is absent from the scene, which seems to bother Israel and Parrett not at all. It isn’t until the debrief has started and hit its first speed bump that the mysterious Arthur bothers to make an appearance, closed off and buttoned down and so _young_ , Eames has the immediate urge to pat him on the head and send him on his way.

Eames has always had a talent for making bad personal decisions. Fortunately, his time in the SAS has taught him not to make assumptions based purely on appearance, so he gives the boy the smile he uses to disarm marks, betting his chips on Parrett’s reputation for finding talent. 

It’s a trait that will only solidify the older he gets, but already Arthur gives off an impression of being untouchable, like the heart and soul of him live behind a sheet of glass that separates him from the people around him. 

Arthur’s first words to Eames are emblematic of their future association.

“You’re late,” he says, managing to sound both indifferent and irritated at once. 

“I’m fashionable,” Eames counters. “You must be Arthur. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“No, you haven’t,” Arthur says flatly, which is unexpected enough that Eames’s interest is roused.

“Schedule?” Parrett asks.

“Adjusted,” Arthur says. 

“To accommodate little old me?” Eames inquires, and gets a curt, “Yes,” instead of the more graceful, “It was no trouble at all,” most people would have given.

Arthur, he decides, is an asshole, and that shouldn’t be as intriguing as it is, but Eames is nothing if not perverse. If he had better judgment, he wouldn’t be the man he is, so instead of apologizing he says admiringly, “I’m sure you were up to the challenge. I appreciated the erasers, by the way. A suspicious man would think you’d been investigating me.”

By way of reply, Arthur hands him a cup of coffee made just like Eames likes it.

The way Eames sees it, this is practically a handwritten invitation. 

The job is a straightforward one, notable only in that Eames has plenty of time to learn more about Arthur, who he establishes early on is possessed of a built-in immunity to Eames’s charm. An intriguing additional discovery is Arthur’s intelligence and sharp tongue, both of which are exercised to annihilating effect the first time Eames tries to seduce him. 

Point men in dreamshare are muscle for hire, notable more for their brawn rather than their brains. Parrett, an unforgiving critic at the best of times, has even been known to refer to them disparagingly as redshirts. Notorious for dreamshare for the lethality of his military training and the finality of his arguments, he’s never before seen the need to hire someone for work he could do perfectly well himself. Why he should change his mind for this job and this man is an unanswered question.

Eames dearly loves an unanswered question. A prudent man would let well enough alone, but there’s prudent and then there’s _Eames_ , and the ends to which his curiosity has driven him in the past makes it more a diagnosable pathology than personality quirk. 

He discovers the first reason early on, when a pointed display of his tattoos fails to rouse more than a token eyebrow from Arthur, but gains from Parrett the information that the extractor shares service ink with his point man. Appealing though the thought of uncovering Arthur’s tattoo might be, it’s somewhat overshadowed by the possibility of nepotism and the sour thought that Parrett’s judgment might be swayable by sentiment.

His third day on the job, Eames arrives in the office to find a dossier on his desk. By now he recognizes Arthur’s neat handwriting and learned how to forge his signature. It’s meticulous in a way he’s learning is typical of the point man, a full workup on the mark’s best friend in high school — a fulcrum he’d been both proposing and opposing the night before.

“She’s in the American Embassy in the Green Zone,” he objects. “I’ll have to get close to her to make a forge convincing enough for the mark.”

Arthur’s head lifts from where he’s studying schematics. “What do you need?” he asks.

Eames sprawls in his chair, knees wide. “Access, for a start. How she moves, how she talks, how she does her hair, her favorite perfume, memories she shared with the mark, nicknames—”

Parrett glances up, distracted from his conversation with Israel. “So what’s the problem?”

“I’m a wanted man in the Green Zone,” Eames points out, then grins engagingly at Parrett and Arthur as they glance at each other. “I could use a burner ID, but they’ve spread my photo around, and they’ve raised security. I wouldn’t get past the first checkpoint.”

“She’s the best option,” Parrett says.

“We could always use the wife. Maybe the divorce wasn’t as bad as it seemed.”

Arthur points out, “She tried to run him over with a Humvee.”

“There you go, then. Obviously they still have feelings for each other,” Eames says encouragingly. “If they didn’t, she’d have used a cheaper car.”

Parrett looks exasperated. “Arthur.”

Without a word, the point man stands and leaves. “Pity,” Eames says without any sincerity whatsoever. He hates Iraq.

The subject, he thinks, is closed; so it comes as a rude shock to be awakened the next morning by Arthur, who demands entry into his hotel room with the arrogance of a man who knows he’s faster on the draw and far better armed. 

“Pack,” Arthur orders, while Eames is still stumbling about in the altogether and demanding how Arthur even knew where he was staying. “You’ll need at least two suits. They have spare wardrobes at the Embassy, but loaners never fit right. You’ll want fatigues as well. US Army.”

“I don’t bloody carry suits and fatigues with me wherever I go,” Eames protests.

Arthur’s frown at him is a subtle thing: a wrinkle in the forehead, a pinch of the lips. “This is San Francisco,” he says inarguably. “You can get some.”

“It’s two a.m. in the fucking morning!”

As an appeal to reason, it fails to sway Arthur. Four hours later, firmly escorted by the most infuriating point man he’s ever had the misfortune to work with, Eames is delivered to SFO as the proud owner of three suits, five ties, and a full set of military fatigues. 

Two hours after that, he’s on a plane to Baghdad with a US State Department ID, a courier pouch, and the dazed feeling of having been sideswiped by a tornado. 

It’s only when he’s being given an _actual_ _apology_ by the military commander of the American quarter for previous misunderstandings — most of them Eames’s doing — that he becomes humblingly aware that he has never worked with a truly competent point man before in his entire career. 

Arthur has either never had the role explained to him, or else has chosen to redefine his responsibilities to a degree that would make even overachievers blanch. Eames, dizzy with the ease with which doors open and difficulties remove themselves, is too drunk on freedom and attendant paranoia to ask.

He returns a week later, armed with the makings of a first-rate forge, a cabinet photo of him shaking hands with the US Deputy Ambassador, and a case of vile _arak_ that Parrett, at least, drinks with silent appreciation. In his absence, Eames learns, Arthur uncovered a rival team hired by their mark to pull off a job on their client. 

“Call our job off?” Eames suggests through a yawn, watching as Arthur rocks back to balance on the hind two legs of his chair, displaying a boy’s faith in his own invulnerability.

Parrett glances at the point man, who doesn’t look up from his notebook. “I’ll take care of it,” Arthur says.

“How?”

“He said he’ll take care of it.” The finality with which Parrett says it slams the door shut on the subject.

Eames has never dealt well with closed doors; he appreciates them in theory, provided he’s the exception who knows what’s on the other side. He is surprised, therefore, that he lets this go. He blames it on his jetlag. In private, he’ll admit it’s a testament to how quickly Arthur has gained his respect, a fact that sits strangely on Eames’s shoulders given how short their acquaintance is and how rarely his respect is given.

Arthur does deal with it, and meanly refuses to tell Eames what he did. Parrett obviously knows, but is likewise reticent. Israel, incurious, doesn’t care. Having placed inexplicable, implicit trust in Arthur’s ability to deal with the situation, Eames is promptly driven mad by the need to second-guess himself, an unusual urge which translates to desperate flirtation that annoys Parrett but doesn’t appear to register with Arthur at all.

It’s around this time that Eames learns Arthur’s rule about bathroom sharing, in the manner most likely to make a permanent impression. Despite the inevitable scar that will result from Parrett’s battlefield stitches, Eames is disconcerted to discover he _likes_ Arthur. There’s something endearing about a man who will knife you for trying to wash your hands while he’s brushing his teeth.

“Just leave him alone,” Parrett grumbles when they’re both under, making final checks on the layout and Eames’s forge. “If you’re that horny, go hire a pro before the extraction. Just make sure you show up on time to the job.”

“Jealousy doesn’t become you, darling,” Eames says without malice, and bounces the mark’s sister’s breasts at him. “If you want to join Arthur and me in a threesome, all you have to do is ask.” 

Parrett, for all he looks like the Marlboro Man, circa 1980s, is a devoted family man with a devoted wife and revoltingly devoted children. Heteronormative tendencies aside, he’s accustomed enough to Eames that he doesn’t rise to the bait, instead saying cynically, “You’d have better luck reaching those with your dick than getting Arthur in the sack.”

Eames would call that egregious provocation.

In any event, the job goes off without a hitch. The payout comes through two weeks later, transferred through back channels by the point man. 

“It was a pleasure, love,” Eames drawls on the phone when Arthur makes contact the following month to close out loose ends. “We really must do this again sometime.”

“You’re a good forger,” Arthur says, the compliment ungrudging but stated more as fact than flattery. “If the occasion comes up, I’ll recommend you.”

“Cheeky,” Eames admires. “I’ve got a few years on you in the business. I’ll have you know I already have a reputation.”

“I’m aware.”

“But if it makes you feel any better, I’ll be happy to recommend you, too,” he says kindly. “So what about it, Arthur? Care to seal a profitable future association with a completely unprofessional shag? I have a feeling we’d be brilliant in bed together.”

“You have an imagination, Mr. Eames, I’ll grant you that,” Arthur says, his voice cool. “I’ll be in touch.”

“For the fuck?” Eames asks hopefully, surprised at his own sincerity, and considers it a win when he hears the shadow of annoyance in Arthur’s good-bye.

It’s a measure of how good Arthur is at covering his tracks that it’s not until their third job together that Eames starts to have suspicions. 

* * *

 

Predictably, it’s Ariadne who freaks out.

“Eight?” she repeats in a strangled voice, while Eames watches Arthur’s face shut down, though not quickly enough that he doesn’t catch the flash of chagrin. “You were _eight_? What the _fuck_ , Arthur?”

“You asked. I don’t see what the problem is,” Yusuf reminds her, ever the peacemaker, inadvertently drawing her fire and incredulous, “You’re _okay_ with this?”

Yusuf, puzzled, says unwisely, "Well, he had to lose his virginity sometime, didn't he? I mean, look at him."

Arthur’s scowl at Yusuf is lopsided, as though he’s uncertain what he’s objecting to. 

“Nothing personal. I’m mostly straight. But I’d bend over for you in a Hong Kong minute, my friend.”

The scowl contracts. Arthur snorts. “Noted.”

“You don’t want Yusuf. You know where he’s been,” Eames recommends, lazy over a mix of satisfaction and speculation: satisfaction of suspicions verified; speculation over why Arthur would reveal anything so personal, under what was relatively mild provocation.

Ariadne ignores him. “How did you have sex when you were _eight_?” she demands. “Who did you have sex with when you were _eight_?”

“Not any of your business," Arthur says, uncharacteristically reluctant to cut his losses. Ariadne, to give her credit, is having none of it.

"Oh no you don't. You don't get to just drop something like that on our heads and then decide to stop talking."

"To be fair," Dom begins.

“Fuck fair.” Despite her blood alcohol level, or because of it, Ariadne is visibly upset, face reddening, eyes hard and sharp like diamonds. “It’s _Arthur_.”

“Who’s almost a real boy,” Eames carols, getting a look from Arthur that is equal parts resigned and murderous. “His balls have even dropped. Old enough to manage his own business.”

“Since when are you on his side?”

“The only side I’m on is my own, pet.” 

“It wasn’t like you think,” Arthur tells Ariadne, more conciliatory than Eames has ever heard him.

Ariadne scrambles up to stand straddle-legged on the settee with her arms akimbo. She’s magnificent in her own way, a dervish in miniature. Yusuf’s face brightens in admiration and not a little misplaced lust. He’s always had a knack for sticking his hand into the blender where women are concerned.

“Did you have sex with another eight year old?” she asks. “Or maybe you like younger women— a six year old?”

“What? No!”

“Someone under the age of ten? Or how about sixteen? No? Then what I think is that you were sexually abused, Arthur. _Abused._ "

"I wasn't abused."

"You were _eight_. There's no way someone can have sex with an eight year old and have it _not_ be abuse. I don’t care who it was, or what they told you. Tell him,” she orders the others.

Eames and Yusuf look at each other. Yusuf shrugs. “Well, by most western standards, maybe—”

“By _western_ standards?” Ariadne repeats, incredulous.

Yusuf raises defensive hands. “Some non-western, too?”

“The UN has— what is it, UNICEF, isn’t it? Those bloody orange coin boxes, little kiddies prancing about on Halloween,” Eames reminds helpfully, which makes Yusuf roll his eyes. 

“Why am I the only one here who seems to get this?” Ariadne demands of the room at large, voice rising. “What is _wrong_ with you people?”

Eames and Yusuf and Arthur exchange glances, respectively wry, bemused, and puzzled. Dom looks at the floor. Unerringly, Ariadne picks on him as the one most likely to side with her in an argument only she seems to know the parameters of. “Dom,” she says into the elastic silence. “What if it was James or Phillipa?”

“Hitting below the belt,” Eames says with approval, balancing his arm on his drawn-up knee and tipping back another drink. “Give the man a chance, Ariadne. He’s only just learning to be a proper daddy again. Kid-diddling is advanced parenting, and he’s still working on the basics of separation anxiety.”

“I’m not a  _child_ —” Arthur grits out, while Dom’s head jerks up, face flushed and creasing with anger, to snap, “ _Fuck_ you, Eames. You don’t get to talk about my family. Not _ever_.”

Angry Dom is one of the few versions of Cobb that Eames actually likes. He raises a mocking eyebrow at the extractor and smirks.

“You’d shoot him,” Ariadne challenges Arthur. “If someone touched Phillipa or James, even if they said it was okay, you’d shoot him.”

Arthur says nothing. It’s Dom who answers for him, sharp and fierce, “He wouldn’t get the chance.”

“But he _would_. You would, Arthur. Because they’re kids, and they would have been _abused_.”

Eames watches Arthur, as the rest of them do. He knows the point man better than any of the others, save only Dom. Because he’s looking for it, he sees the tiny crack of relief behind the cold barrier of hostility, the old exhaustion that drags firm lips down. 

“I wouldn’t get the chance. Dom would get there first,” Arthur says, with a neutrality that fools no one.

“But,” Ariadne pushes.

“It’s different, Ariadne.”

“ _But!_ ”

Arthur sighs, crossing glances with Dom. “I'd wait for you,” he tells him.

“Knives are good,” Yusuf recommends. “Slower.”

Triumph falters on Ariadne’s face, the brief light guttering into unease. The simplicity of Arthur’s reply is more chilling than the display of an actual weapon; the hypothetical situation Ariadne proposed is abruptly weighted with an actual corpse, as burdensome in potentiality as it ever would be in reality. In reality, Arthur would make sure nobody found a body.

For all her association with dreamshare, for all their jokes about Arthur’s kill count, Ariadne has apparently never really absorbed the uglier reality of it. The look she’s giving Arthur now is uncertain. The one he is giving back, regretful.

“Have another glass,” Eames recommends, wondering at himself. He’s not usually inclined towards defusing tension, being far more likely to provoke it, entranced by the complexities of what makes people tick. “Too much shouting. Not enough drinking. That’s not what I came here for.”

“Hear hear!” Yusuf agrees, relieved. 

“Somebody was saying something about brandy?”

“This isn’t—” Ariadne starts, but Eames cuts her off with a weary, “Done with that. Discuss it later if you really feel the need to, ta. I need a refill or something new. Toss me that bottle, Dom.”

“This is 30-year-old cognac. I’m not going to _toss—_ ”

“Thank you, Arthur,” Eames says warmly, as the heavy bottle slaps neatly into his outflung hand. “You’re a love, have I ever mentioned?”

“Repeatedly.”

“Care to come back to my place after this and let me shag you silly?”

“Drink your cognac, Mr. Eames.”

“What is wrong with you people?” Ariadne snaps, temper blazing into the strained inanities. The others stare at her; Eames, wiping out an empty glass with his shirt front, whistles through his teeth. “Seriously. What is wrong with you? We just found out that Arthur was _sexually abused_ , and you’re _hitting_ on him?”

“He’s eminently fuckable,” Eames points out.

“I second that opinion,” Yusuf makes haste to chime in.

“Thanks,” Arthur says.

Yusuf grins. “Anytime. No, really. Anytime at all.”

“The question you should be asking,” Eames counters, glancing up at Ariadne with some sympathy, “is what’s wrong with _you_?”

Taken aback, Ariadne knits her brow at him. “What do you mean, what’s wrong with me?”

“Arthur’s a grown man. A gorgeous, dangerous, charmingly cranky masterpiece of a man. A bit unimaginative, maybe; a stick up his ass the size of Yorkshire; the sense of humor of a pregnant warthog—”

“Please don’t help,” Arthur says.

“I’m getting to the point in a minute, darling. Steady on.”

“Feel free not to take your time about it.”

“Just because his past makes you feel like you can’t touch him with a ten-foot pole anymore, doesn’t mean I have to feel the same way,” Eames tells Ariadne nicely. “No need to get stroppy just because you’re jealous.”

Ariadne’s scowl is raspberries and cream, tart and ferociously endearing. “I’m not jealous. It’s just ... it’s inappropriate, is all. I happen to love Arthur like a brother.”

“I’m not like a brother, am I?” Yusuf asks, alarmed. “I don’t want to be like a brother.”

“He’s still the same man he was before. No reason to treat him differently,” Eames says, licking cognac off his fingers.

Ariadne’s flush deepens, her mouth tremulous with belated guilt. “I just think there’s something wrong when someone could abuse _Arthur_.”

“But he wasn’t Arthur then, was he?” Eames’s gaze meets the point man’s. Arthur’s hard eyes study him, searching, questioning. “He was just some kid. What do you think happens to unprotected kids out there in the real world, pet?”

Ariadne’s eyes glitter; she drags a hasty, rough arm across them. “But it was _Arthur_ ,” she says, anger collapsing to leave misery in its place; as though in the romantic or tragic pasts she’d imagined for them all, only Arthur was untouched and untouchable. 

The waking world is always more sordid and dreary than perfect fantasy. It’s why they dream. 

Into the thickness of uncomfortable silence, Dom says with seeming inconsequence, “Thanks, Arthur.”

Arthur says without emotion, “Anytime, Cobb.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

The third job Arthur and Eames do together is with the Cobbs.

 _Do together_ is a misnomer; the client is brought in by Eames, who calls on the Cobbs — newly arrived in the field from academia, but blazing new trails nonetheless — to help with a new concept in dreamshare: militarization. 

“Arthur,” Eames greets with surprise, when he arrives at the client’s office and finds the point man waiting for him in the foyer. When the client is also the mark, there’s little need for the unique skillset Arthur brings to the table. “Here on business?”

“Yours,” Arthur says, parsimonious with words. “Mal called me.”

“I didn’t even know you knew her.”

“We’ve talked once or twice.” Since Eames doesn’t give ground, Arthur relents far enough to admit, “She asked me for a favor.”

“Bloody hell. She didn’t really?”

“Civilian.” Arthur sounds almost apologetic about Mal’s ignorance about dreamshare etiquette. Favors in their business tend to be a literally bloody business, to be wielded only when lives are or livelihoods are at stake. Certainly not for cakewalk jobs like this one. Still, Arthur doesn’t sound especially displeased about it, so Eames lets it go.

None of which explains why Arthur bothered to answer Mal’s request, much less why Mal would call him, but Eames isn’t in any position to dictate terms. He’s simply the dubiously trustworthy contact with the client, not the lead for the job. For all practical purposes, it’s the Cobbs’s show.

Ascending 55 floors is interminable. Eames flirts. Arthur doesn’t seem to notice. Par for the course.

“It’s only a few months old, so there are only a handful of people who are truly militarized,” Dom tells the client, enthusiasm making him look even younger than his ill-fitted suit does. “The phrase is actually quite literal, though of course, each mind interprets self-defense in a different way. Depending on the personality of the mind and the training technique used, it can be spectacularly aggressive. We’re still learning the most effective techniques to get the kind of response the client is hoping for, of course, and very few militarized minds can control it enough to have them stand down, as yet—”

Insofar as a sales pitch goes, it’s about as bad as one might expect from Dom. Fortunately, the client, an executive at GSK rumored to be next in line for CEO, is a motivated individual. 

“Less explanation,” he says tersely. “More demonstration.”

This, Eames discovers, is what Arthur is there for. Mal sets up the PASIV in the client’s posh office suite, Dom chattering away happily as she does.

“—one of the most aggressively militarized minds I’ve ever come across,” Dom is saying, while Arthur settles in one of the soft couches of the suite and rolls up his sleeve for the needle. “He’s also one of the rare exceptions that can have his militarization stand down as needed, although of course for the demonstration he’ll be operating under the assumption that we’re intruders—”

“Eames?” Mal asks quietly, while Arthur’s eyes slide shut. 

Eames tears his gaze away from Arthur; the point man’s face, so closed and guarded while awake, is tantalizingly vulnerable in sleep. Mal, he discovers, is offering him the cannula, an invitation to go under.

It’s not in the original plan for Eames to join them. Then again, Eames has never had much use for plans.

He’s been in Arthur’s dreams before, working on the kinks in architecture and forges before the job. Arthur’s freeform constructions incline towards steel and glass, cold and severe, a buttoned down version of the buttoned down man. (By contrast, Eames's veer sharply towards the exotic — confusing, rich colors and movement that spin the senses, “Like Alice in Wonderland if Alice was a synesthetic junkie,” one of his architects complained once, “My God, has anything ever outpaced your id?”) 

Colleagues complain about the complications of Eames’s fantasy structures, but to Eames’s mind, Arthur’s are far more interesting. The point man’s comparatively forthright designs are never simple. Straight lines are hopelessly deceptive. Ninety-degree corners strand you back where you started. Doors lead to empty space, and stairs turn endlessly on themselves, advancing not at all. They say something significant about Arthur, Eames thinks, and finds himself enthralled even while he’s trying to paint lurid graffiti on the manicured alleyways of Arthur’s mind.

They arrive in the middle of what looks like an office lobby, Arthur standing casually apart and looking around him with the disinterested curiosity of a tourist. The client, disconcerted, wavers and blinks; Dom immediately launches into the orientation speech: this is a dream. Do you know how you got here? Do you know where you are?

“This should be fun,” Eames says in the meantime, balancing on the balls of his feet in the gleeful certainty that something is about to fuck him over. “I never knew you were militarized.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” Arthur says, matter-of-fact. 

“Just think of the fun it’ll be uncovering them.”

If he were anything other than the most uncooperative tease in the history of dreamspace, Arthur would have responded with a demure smile or a coy droop of eyelids. Instead, he says, “You shouldn’t be here.”

It’s enough to make a man despair. “Am I making you uncomfortable, pet?” 

“It wasn’t part of the plan.”

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

This wins him a frown. It’s a heady feeling, being able to inspire that expression. Eames rather adores the way Arthur’s brow crinkles, the way his lips pinch down and misappropriate his dimples. “I’m doing you a favor,” Arthur says, and Eames says meltingly, “Oh, _darling_ ,” at which Arthur folds his mouth even tighter and apparently decides to give him the silent treatment.

Dom is still unraveling the client’s assumptions and misconceptions in a five minute Dreamspace for Dummies lecture that roams dizzyingly across tangents and side-paths like he’s being paid by the word. Eames is more interested in Mal. 

It’s the first time he’s seen Arthur and Mal in the same room, though he’s had the odd twitch of _deja vu_ when with one or the other of them: an expression here; a phrase there; a frown or a glance that strokes familiarly across his memory to make it purr like a pampered cat. The likeness is more striking now that he can see them side by side, apparent as much in their coloring as in the wary grace with which they move, predators that expect the worst but don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t look beautiful while waiting.

If he were a less observant man — if he understood people less than he did — he’d see their strange, fraught affinity and think they were lovers. The looks between them speak more than their silences do; while Dom lectures, getting drunk off the pleasure of his own voice, the two of them prowl around each other without a word, Mal’s hands taking liberties with Arthur’s person, his gaze following her with hunger.

Because Eames is Eames, he sees Mal’s hands are checking that Arthur is hale and whole, not with possessive greed, but with concern, even though physical health in dreamspace bears no relation to reality for professionals. Because Eames is Eames, he sees Arthur’s fixed attention on her and reads it as gratitude rather than lust, a self-contained relief that leans into each touch as though starved for it.

Because Eames is Eames, he reads the gentle movement of Arthur’s lips by Mal’s ear, and the equally tender murmur of her reply.

_You shouldn’t have brought him down._

_Injuries need to breathe to heal, my love._

Though he’s only feeling the first flutters of it, Eames suspects he’s doomed to eventual madness where Arthur is concerned, that he’ll fall willingly into the mystery of him until the itch of curiosity is rooted too deep to pull out.

“So?” Eames breaks into Dom’s soliloquy and the twitch of the client’s impatience. “Do we wait? Or do we trigger the security?”

Dom glances at Arthur, who shrugs. Mal pulls away from him and draws her gun. “Watch this,” Dom says, and picks up a pen from the reception desk. He lets it fall back to the desk.

It goes plink.

Eames raises his eyebrows. Mal releases the safety.

Arthur’s security goes batshit.

Eames has been in three militarized minds during his career to date. There’s a certain consistency to all of them. Projections get homicidal, weapons get pointed, things explode. In his opinion, this conformity to real life conditions is one of the best things about militarization; it means the one with the most imagination or the most bullets (sometimes) wins, which makes it good odds as long as the paycheck is big enough.

It figures that Arthur’s militarization would be something else entirely.

“What’s happening to the floor?” the client asks, alarmed, taking a few, futile steps back. The concrete floor has turned soft, almost squishy underfoot. Even through their shoes they can tell it’s alive, breathing, see the faintest trace of veins beneath its surface.

It’s weird. Creepy. A few seconds later, when it starts bleeding through spontaneously generated pores, Eames adds slippery and disgusting to the list. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches sight of Arthur grimacing down at his shoes.

“Never seen that before,” Eames observes.

“That’s new,” Dom admits, peering down at it. 

“Maybe we should have waited to see how long it would take his security to detect us.”

Dom shrugs. “It’s Arthur. The second you interact with anything in his dream, his security triggers. Even if it’s just opening a door.”

“Paranoia as a subconscious interior design theme is a bold life choice,” Eames tells Arthur nicely, and gets in reply a frowning glance and an even-voiced, “Condescending to a man whose security is on the rampage isn’t a wise one.”

In the near distance, they can already hear footsteps, dozens of them, shuddering through the skin floor in their direction. Through the glass doors, they can see hundreds of bodies congregating, converging on their building. An inordinate number of them are children. 

“Don’t worry,” Dom says with manic cheer. “We’ll shoot our way out of the dream before they get too close.”

“What will they do if they get too close?” the client asks nervously.

“Rip us apart,” Mal says.

“Literally,” Dom says, and makes a claw out of one hand. “They grab chunks of flesh and rip it right—”

He shuts up when Mal slaps another gun into his hand.

“What do we do?” the client demands.

“Run,” she says.

Mal, Eames reflects as they dash into the elevator, is a very intelligent woman with very bad taste in men.

Arthur goes with them, if at a slightly more leisurely pace. The elevator proves to be a mistake. Really, the transforming skin floor should have been a hint that the building wasn’t going to conform to normal standards. Halfway between floors four and five, it jolts to a stop. 

“Bollocks,” Eames says, because the walls are starting to heat up in a very pointed way and the floor is starting to sag in an uncharitable way. “Don’t think I’ve ever been roasted to death in a dream before.”

“I have,” Dom says enthusiastically. “Remember, Arthur? The last time but one, his projections trapped us in a car and set it on fire. There was no smoke. Our arms were trapped so we couldn’t reach our guns. It took us almost half an hour to die. Worst thing I’ve ever been through.”

“Sorry about that,” Arthur says, without bothering to sound sincere.

Dom waves a dismissive hand. “It’s not like you weren’t burning to death with me.”

Eames stares at Arthur. Militarized or not, the tendency for almost every mind that Eames has ever been in has been for projections to try to protect their dreamer. Occasionally there is the odd self-sabotaging projection, but even suicidal, the human mind is self-serving; instincts for self-preservation are the most primal there are. 

For a dreamer to die because of something his own projections did is almost unthinkable.

Dom is still carrying on, alight with academic excitement. “The most incredible thing is, somehow, he militarized himself. We haven’t been able to figure out how yet, but I have some ideas—”

There’s something very wrong with Dom Cobb. Eames is starting to think the same about Arthur.

Mal has already dreamt up some jaws of life, apparently operating under the _might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb_ philosophy. Eames is only a half-second behind her. Between them, with a little unexpected help from the client, they manage to lever the doors open and scramble out onto the floor above. None of them get out without a few burns, which promptly start to blister painfully.

The sprinklers are on, and instead of spraying water, they’re dropping cereal. Honest to goodness breakfast cereal, lurid sugary loops that hammer down on their injuries and get stuck in their hair, crunch underfoot, throw up powdery crumbs to get caught in their throat. 

“What the fuck,” the client wheezes as they start stumbling down the corridor.

Arthur stands in the middle of the corridor and turns his face up, eyes closing against the rain of sugary crack. 

“Arthur?” Eames asks.

The point man shakes his head.

Which is when the far end of the corridor suddenly darkens and grows wet, and _giant fucking teeth_ smash together through the walls. Past the floor, which has suddenly turned pink and nubbly like a tongue, they can see the glistening obscenity of tonsils.

“Oh,” Dom says, suddenly queasy. “That’s new, too.”

“I feel like I’m being violated by my dentist,” Eames says, while behind him the client mutters, “I suppose if you’re going to have cereal, you need to have teeth—”

“Run,” Mal says curtly, and sprints for it.

They make it to the stairwell just in front of the thunderous, repetitive crash of teeth, coughing on cereal dust the entire way. “I’m not sure whether to be impressed or terrified by you, Arthur,” Eames confesses to Mal, as they pause for a second to struggle with the fire door.

“I know which one I am,” the client wheezes. 

They tumble into the stairwell — ”Up!” Mal orders — where they discover that the only thing of note there is a group of heavily armed men storming up towards them. Bullets start flying. Eames is almost drunk with relief at the sheer _normalcy_ of that, he can’t even be upset when he spots an Apache Longbow descending outside the windows that make up one wall of the stairwell.

Its guns are really, really big. Eames doesn’t even have time to dream himself a weapon before bullets the size of his arm are reducing the concrete around them into component molecules.

Eames adds another item to his list of Things Learned About Arthur. Tendency towards serious overkill.

It’s impossible to hear what Mal is shouting through the ear-shattering noise, but it isn’t like there are too many choices left. There are shooters below them, which Arthur is picking off with cold-blooded efficiency, despite the fact he’s already been shot — _shot!_ the dreamer, shot by his own projections! — twice. There’s the fucking Apache, which is blowing up what ground they’ve got left to stand on. That leaves up.

Up they go, bullets chasing concrete shrapnel the entire way. 

The Apache isn’t waiting for them when they get to the top, six hundred flights later, but that’s probably because there’s no point. The entire roof is a deathtrap, a door that opens onto a sloped roof that’s all of five feet by five feet, without even a railing to keep someone from falling to the very, very distant ground below.

Which is a problem, because the suddenly it’s raining, and the roof is made of smooth metal, and there’s nothing to hold onto, and—

“You’ve got to be _shitting_ me!” the client explodes, right before he disappears over the edge with a failing scream. Mal lifts her gun too late to shoot him; then she’s sliding off the roof as well, flailing as she goes.

Eames has just enough to time to catch Arthur’s eye, see a flash of — something, regret maybe, but why? — and then Arthur is falling after Mal, his arms flung wide in a swan dive. For a split-second he’s suspended in mid-air, arms outstretched in expectant wings like he has decided to redefine gravity as well, falcon in his own dream. 

Then he’s gone.

By rights, the dream should come apart when the dreamer dies. Dom and Eames fall off the building before it can, the breath ripped out of their lungs; suffocated by air, of all ridiculous things. And it’s madness, utter madness, but they land, and even though their minds know they should be dead, they’re not. They’re cushioned by a ground that’s softer than pillows, a warm, thick blanket that would coddle a child against the cold. 

They land, and they look up, and before they can get their guns pointed the right way they are literally ripped to pieces — clothes first, then skin, then muscles and tendons and God, _God_ — by disturbingly young projections. It’s like Children of the Corn, except with Little League uniforms. 

It takes longer than he’d like for Eames to die. He can’t help but notice through the _blood_ and the _fucking agony_ that Arthur is being torn apart just like them.

Unlike the rest of them, he doesn’t make a sound.

* * *

 

“I shouldn’t have yelled at him,” Ariadne’s voice tells Eames through the closed door.

Eames, who is perfectly comfortable with lack of privacy when necessary but expects a certain standard of decorum when he’s trying to take a crap in the Presidential Suite of the fucking Venetian Hotel, lets his head fall into his hands.

“Not the most tactful choice, I grant you,” he answers, since he can be a sport and is rather fond of Ariadne, in his own way. “Bit insensitive, yeah?”

“Do you think I should apologize?”

“Up to you.”

“Would _you_ apologize?”

“To Arthur?”

“Who else?”

“My entire life is an apology as far as Arthur’s concerned,” Eames says with a little more sincerity and a lot more satisfaction than is strictly called for. 

“That’s not true. He likes you a lot.”

Eames really doesn’t want to be having this conversation while his trou are down around his ankles. Or rather, he does, but not ... in this particular scenario. “Of course he does. Everybody likes me.”

“No, I mean— he said something nice about you just ten minutes ago.”

“Oh? And what was that, then?”

“He said you weren’t the worst forger he knew.”

Only Arthur. Eames suppresses a laugh. “That’s not 'nice,' love. That’s a statement of fact. Have you ever met any other forgers?”

“Well. No.”

“You’re in for a nasty shock, then.”

There’s a thump on the door, and the mumbling whisper of a body settling up against its panel. Ariadne’s sigh is heavy enough to paint wood. “I shouldn’t have yelled at him. I was just surprised.”

“Perfectly understandable.”

“You weren’t, though,” Ariadne complains, sounding muffled. “Was I the only one who didn’t know?”

“About Arthur’s past? I think Dom might have known, but the rest of us didn’t.” At least, not with any absolute certainty. An almost positive suspicion hardly counts.

“You didn’t seem surprised.”

“Not much surprises you after you’ve been in this business long enough.”

“This better not be where you tell me I’m just young and sheltered,” Ariadne warns, her voice gaining vigor. “I’ll have you know I’ve been learning how to use a gun. Arthur took me to the range just this morning.”

Eames grins, lifting his head. “Ariadne, darling. What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of the people you’ve met in dreamshare?”

There’s a short pause on the other side of the door. “Assholes? Insane?”

That one deserves a chuckle. “I would’ve said criminal, myself, but that’ll do. Any idea what end of the income and social ladder tends to end up in the insane asshole criminal classes?”

“And now you’re just going to call me _privileged_.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Eames assures her. “But even your self-importantly civilized country has a fairly high rate of child abuse in that end of society. More unprotected kids. More predators. Nobody to give a fuck.”

Ariadne says bitterly, “It’s all old news to you, isn’t it? Been there, done that—”

“Hardly _done that_. But if you stay in this business long enough, or even a little while, I guarantee you’ll see it again.” Eames turns the page of his magazine to admire Angelina Jolie’s breasts. “It’s nothing new, love. ”

“But ... _Arthur_.”

Eames hums noncommittally, and Ariadne sharpens into, “You knew about him. I _knew_ it.”

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it? He’s such a beautifully constructed piece of work. No flaws at all.”

He can just barely hear her mutter through the wood: I’ll show him piece of work.

He has to swallow back another laugh. “A word of advice, Ariadne. By and large, the people in dreamshare won’t thank you for treating them like victims. They’re not anymore. It’s why they’re in dreamshare.”

“I’m going to go apologize to Arthur,” Ariadne says, suddenly somber. “And then I’m going to hug him.”

Arthur will hate that. Eames’s cheeks hurt from the sheer viciousness of his grin. “That’s a brilliant plan. Ta.”

“Whenever you’re done doing whatever you’re doing in there—"

"What do you _think_ I'm doing in here?"

"—I’m going to hug you, too. Make sure you wash your hands first, though. Whatever it is you're doing. Don't tell me. I don't need to know.”

He laughs.

“And ... Eames?"

"Hm?"

"I’m really sorry,” Ariadne says gently, which drags his attention up for a blink at the door. It’s too late for a useful reply; the sound of her pushing off from the door and darting away is faint, but obvious enough.

He has the uneasy feeling that her sorry was meant as condolence, not apology.

* * *

 

“So,” Ariadne says, leaning into Arthur with her hands on her hips, her eyes narrowed. “Here’s the thing. I’m sorry I called you a moron.”

In theory, Arthur has been cornered in the kitchen. He stands, literally, in the corner between the wall and the counter, hands empty, exit blocked. In Yusuf’s opinion, watching their reflection from his hidden vantage point around the refrigerator, it’s Ariadne who looks vaguely trapped, if determined to pretend otherwise.

“You didn’t call me a moron,” Arthur points out, puzzled.

“In my head,” Ariadne explains. “Earlier.”

A line creases Arthur’s brow. “You called me a moron?” 

“You’re not a moron.”

“I know.”

“I’m just saying, you know. You’re not. And I’m sorry I yelled at you. Although you deserved it a little, because it’s like you’re not seeing what’s in front of your eyes, which is kind of moronic— but that’s not the point. It was insensitive of me.”

For the first time, Arthur looks hunted. “Insensitive,” he echoes, and eyes her warily. 

His instincts are sound. Ariadne announces, “I’m going to hug you now, to show how I support you and care for you.” A second later, she’s wrapped herself around him like a small, stylish limpet.

Yusuf is impressed at how Arthur manages to keep himself from reaching too obviously for a weapon, though his hand twitches yearningly towards his holster before it reluctantly pats Ariadne on the back.

“Thanks,” Arthur says, sounding anything but grateful.

Her face still buried in Arthur’s chest, Ariadne’s words are indistinct at best. “You can always talk to me about anything, you know. I won’t yell at you again.”

“Should you really be this drunk?”

“Unless you deserve to be yelled at. Which, to be clear, would be because you’re a dick and not because you’ve been the victim of a horrific experience.”

It’s fascinating to Yusuf how Arthur can convey such deep levels of discomfort without ever changing expression. Eames would be all over this, if he were aware. Pity that Yusuf is too interested in the scene to go get him.

Arthur pats Ariadne on the back again, in lieu of making any actual reply.

“Do you want to?” Ariadne asks, rearing back to peer up at him. 

“Want to— what?”

“You know.”

Arthur frowns down at her. “Have sex?”

“Oh _God_ ,” Ariadne says, and detaches herself from him with a haste that would be unflattering if it weren’t hilarious. Yusuf is impressed yet again; Arthur doesn’t betray his amusement by so much as an eye twitch. “ _Talk_. Just talk!” She waves expressive hands at him. “As friends!”

“Because you think of me like a brother,” Arthur says, as though just remembering.

Ariadne is attractive at all times, in Yusuf’s opinion, but she’s especially pretty when she blushes. “About that,” she says, then is stunned into silence by an unexpected smile from Arthur. 

It’s that damned dimple. Arthur never smiles enough for anyone to grow numb to its effect.

“I don’t mind being a brother,” he says, and rumples Ariadne’s hair before she’s recovered enough to dodge his hand. “At least you dress well enough for me to adopt without embarrassment.”

“Asshole,” Ariadne accuses as she attempts to reorder her hair, but she sounds pleased nonetheless.

Arthur is mixing drinks, or was when Ariadne confronted him in the kitchen. He returns to his work, the clink of ice sounding around the barrier of his back. Beside him, Ariadne wiggles her way up to perch on the counter next to the bottles, watching as he proves himself as competent a bartender as he is a point man.

Yusuf is just about to wander in and announce his presence, when she breaks their comfortable silence. “So,” she says, her heels thumping the cabinets. “Tell me something.”

“What?” 

“Something about—you know. I mean, if you want to,” she makes haste to add, when Arthur stills and turns his head to look up at her. “This is me, offering a friendly shoulder.”

“I think you mean shoving,” Arthur says mildly.

“It’s still friendly.”

Arthur’s forehead wrinkles, like he’s trying to find something to say and is coming up short of options. After a while, he huffs out a breath. “I don’t know what you want to hear,” he says, sounding sincerely perplexed.

“Maybe—” Ariadne begins, then trails off, sounding puzzled herself. “What do you feel like saying?”

He appears to think about this. Then: “I’ve only ever told two people about this before.”

“And?”

Arthur shrugs. “That’s it. I’ve only ever told two people about this before. That’s what I wanted to say.”

Ariadne makes a squeaky sound. Arthur shies back when she lunges at him with both arms open, too late to avoid another full-body hug. 

She’s sniffling. “Arthur,” she says thickly. “We really are your friends.”

“I should make a pot of coffee,” he says after a moment. 

“You _love_ us.”

He sighs. “I’ll make two.”


	4. Chapter 4

 

It’s another three years before Eames has his tenth job with Arthur. By way of karmic commemoration, the extractor is Parrett again, who warns him upfront that the job is high risk and he’s not putting up with Eames's shit, “So try to keep it in your goddamn pants this time, man.”

Eames finds it unfair that he was actually intending to be a gentleman this time around, but now through no fault of his own is practically required to misbehave. It's a matter of principle.

Unlike the first time they worked together, there are now stories aplenty about Arthur, which Eames’s colleagues have been eager to share with him in the elite game of dreamspace Telephone.

“Oh, him,” says a (laughably titled) point man in Calcutta, his sneer a complicated mix of dislike and yearning. “You want to talk about blokes who think their shit don’t stink— you hear how he got grabbed in Beijing?”

“He’s a son of a bitch, isn’t he?” says a chemist in Mombasa, his eyes going round and then soft with worship. “He saved our asses in Georgia. Aiyaa, did you hear what he did on the Kitelin job?”

In Jerusalem, an extractor arches into Eames and smiles, his eyes lust-blown and shrewd. “He broke Remorka’s arm for trying to cop a feel,” he confides. “Miko says she practically buttered herself up and draped herself naked across him, and he didn’t bat an eye. Did you hear what he did to Tomasi when he tried to get into his pants?”

Eames hoards the tales and coaxes still more from his cohorts in dreamshare, feeling an inexplicable, vicarious thrill of pride at Arthur’s growing reputation. When they finally meet in Lausanne, he takes a moment to delight in the self-possessed crankiness of the point man, noting the way he’s settled further into his skin, how confidence has soaked into his bones. And oh. _Oh_. Arthur has started wearing _suits_.

The suit is _brilliant_.

 “You’re famous, Arthur,” he greets, dazed by lust.

“You’re still late, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says, which is true, if only by a measly twenty-six hours. Only a nitpicker like Arthur would have noticed.

Story of his life.

The job has a deadline, an oblivion stipulation that requires the mark be unaware he was extracted, and restrictions the likes of which makes Eames narrow his eyes suspiciously. Only Parrett knows the client’s identity, but Eames has been around the block and he recognizes the signs. It makes him uncomfortable to think he might be working on the side of the angels, for a change — inasmuch as one could call the CIA “angels,” barring irony — but he’s there for the paycheck, not for his finer feelings.

Militarization is getting more popular, so naturally the mark is on the cutting edge, just to fuck with said paycheck. Over the next few days, they also discover that his paranoia gives Arthur’s a run for its money. The security surrounding him is professional, competent, and 24/7, consisting of men the mark has known for years. The patterns of his schedule are no patterns at all. He has no forthcoming surgeries or dentist appointments; no upcoming travel that would give them a chance at a quick grab and bag. No mistress or wife, or even household staff that can be bribed or replaced. 

“It’s like he always wanted to grow up to be an accountant, and accidentally ended an international arms dealer instead,” Eames complains. “Just reading about him is putting me to sleep.”

“Live the dream,” Arthur says.

In fact, the only signs that the man even has a life outside of work are the young, dark-haired boys occasionally picked up at different hotels in the city. They go in poor and come out wealthier in bruises and cash, one night paid encounters during which the mark has two bodyguards keeping watch _in the room_.

“Impressive,” Arthur comments with grudging respect, when they’re standing over the tatters of their sixth acquisition idea.

“If only I’d known voyeurism was one of your kinks.” Eames smiles at the irritated glance Arthur shoots him. “Obviously, I’ve been going about things all wrong.”

“Punctuality is one of my kinks. I don’t see you catering to that one.”

“If you want to know when I’m coming, you only need to ask,” Eames says slyly, getting his reward in a twitch of Arthur’s lip and Parrett’s sigh of, “For _fuck’s_ sake—”

“If only you would, Arthur,” Eames tells Arthur.

“If only you wouldn’t, Mr. Eames,” Arthur retorts.

He doesn’t frown when he says it though, which Eames takes as a sign that he’s making progress.

It’s the only front on which he is, unfortunately. They spend two more days taking apart the mark’s schedule and vulnerabilities. It’s grim. No matter how many times they break down the security situation, they’re unable to find a way in to the mark.

“There’s always a way,” Eames drawls after the ninth such futile review, when tempers are frayed and Parrett has started obsessively cleaning his knives: always a bad sign. Eames grins at Arthur with a false confidence he knows will irritate. “You just have to be more creative, love.”

“Please. Feel free to educate me,” Arthur says crisply, clipping his words into precise, unhappy squares. “I’m sure the entire class would be happy to know what I missed.”

Eames has no real ideas — nothing that wouldn’t be considered suicidal at best, and idiotic at worst — but boredom brings out the worst in him. “If you can’t do something out of sight, Arthur, do it in full view and be damned with it.”

It’s nonsense, and they all know it. Less competent teams have taken Eames’s pseudo-zen bullshit and faffed about trying to figure something out from it, easily overawed by his reputation. 

He expects to get shot down with one of Arthur’s annihilating retorts, or by one of Parrett’s silent stares. Instead, it’s Arthur who stares at him, Parrett who says, “Don’t be a fucking idiot.”

“That’s what mediocrity always says when faced by mad genius,” Eames says loftily.

He’s the only one looking at Arthur, so he’s the only one who sees the frightened twist of Arthur’s face before it goes blank and white, expressionless. 

“In full view,” Arthur says slowly.

“What are you thinking?” Parrett demands. 

Arthur unfolds out of his chair piece by piece with none of his usual grace, like he’s having to remind himself what joint does what, which limb goes where.

“I have an in,” he says.

Overnight, the job turns into the kind that Eames loves best: ambitious, risky, wildly creative. Arthur’s plan to grab the mark is initially shared only with Parrett, who shouts behind closed doors at the point man for an hour before emerging to rip apart their nascent extraction scenario and recreate it from scratch. 

Parrett brings Sonja Masterson three days later and introduces her to them as their new extractor.

“I’ll be running backup on point instead,” Parrett says, when Eames raises surprised eyebrows at him.

“Did Arthur get hit by a bus, and no one tell me?”

Arthur, rocking back in his chair as is his wont, lifts his pencil from the notes he’s taking and holds it up. “Sitting right here.”

“Is Arthur _going to be_ hit by a bus, and no one tell me?” Eames corrects.

Parrett’s mouth turns down at the corners. “We’ll need proximity to his topside security for the acquisition,” he says. “Arthur’s might not be available for cover.”

“Do tell,” Eames invites, but Parrett doesn’t. 

Neither does Arthur. Typical.

They make two versions of the plan, one with a team of four, one with a team of five. When the run-throughs perfect enough to satisfy even Parrett, Arthur disappears. 

The team is put on standby. “We have to be ready to move any minute,” Parrett tells what’s left of the team, Arthur’s usual chair an empty, itching scab in the corner of everyone’s eyes. “Nobody goes more than five minutes away, or drops out of radio contact until the job’s done.”

It’s a rule that seems to apply to everyone but him. Parrett disappears each evening for a couple of hours. Not that Eames minds, since when he’s around, he runs them through practice deployments under Sonja’s direction, timing them with an anal-retentive attention to milliseconds that borders on the religious.

Eames entertains himself for the next six days by trying to figure out what the plan is to get to the mark. Cho-Ming, the chemist, is busy making adjustments to the PASIV that he doesn’t explain beyond, “Parrett told me to.” Sonja is tasked with getting blueprints and layouts of six different hotels in the city, which suggests that the mark’s occasional hookup is the play. 

Conversation with Cho-Ming is boring; he’s so obsessed by chemicals, it’s like fishing in an empty pond. Sonja proves to be a decent lay, but is as secretive as Parrett and nowhere near as intelligent.

Eames misses Arthur. It’s annoying.

On the seventh evening, Sonja gets a phone call. Ten seconds later, they’re tearing out of the warehouse in a sedan.

Parrett, she tells them, will meet them there. The instructions she gives are curt, illuminating, and obviously well-planned in advance. It takes them fifteen minutes to get to where they’re going, a shabby-riche hotel near the center of the city. Sonja tosses the keys to valet service and they enter without hesitation, playing the parts of tired tourists, fresh from a jaunt to the country.

The rabbity clerk at the front desk gives them room cards without question, and when they head up to the sixth floor, it’s to find the mark’s security watching the elevator and the suite next to the one Eames and Sonja stagger into.

Parrett is already waiting for them. A few seconds later, the adjoining door to the next suite opens; Cho-Ming ambles in with the PASIV, looking pleased with himself. 

It takes only a few minutes to set things up the way Parrett wants, Sonja and he muttering over the layouts she brought until they decide to put the PASIV on the floor by the west wall and pencil a little X on the wall near the floor. Once that’s done, they wait until Parrett gets some electronic signal, presumably from Arthur, and drills a small hole through the wall between their suite and the mark’s, which he promptly stops up again with a sock.

Then they wait some more. The walls are old world solid, but the sounds of sex are still faintly audible through the plaster.

“That’s the problem with European cinema. The sound is never in sync with the picture,” Eames remarks, just to be a dick. Nobody answers him. 

Parrett starts cleaning his knives, his eyes fixed on the screen of his phone. 

It takes a couple of hours, but eventually he gets another signal. The sock is removed from the hole; the modified line Cho-Ming attached to the PASIV is fed through. In their own suite, Sonja and Cho-Ming go under.

“We need at least four,” Eames hisses at Parrett, when the extractor makes no move to join them.

Parrett jerks his head towards the door. “Arthur,” he whispers back in either a promise or a threat, there’s the pinch of the needle on Eames’s arm, and then he’s in the dream.

It takes longer than Eames would like, but Arthur materializes next to them before the projections start to get suspicious, welcomed by a relieved mutter from Cho-Ming and a grateful nod from Sonja. He looks strangely insubstantial for the first few minutes to Eames’s eyes, his outlines blurry in the way novices are when they start out in dreamshare. Outside the settings of their own dreams, most people lack the clarity of self-identity to shape themselves, much less things around them.

Eames nudges him, lifting an eyebrow in question. It’s Arthur though, and even off his game he’s the best at what he does; he only needs a glance down at himself to realize, and a second later he’s perfectly solid, a wolf in human skin.

A manic grin pulls at Eames’s mouth, glee bubbling through his blood like champagne. Arthur draws his gun.

The job is pedal to the metal, hanging on by the fingernails the entire way, but the pressure brings out the best in them; success is a result of genius and inspiration, combined with adrenaline and sheer bloody-mindedness. The end is a mad scramble. Fittingly, it’s Arthur who draws them away for the pivotal five minutes they need, diving out from behind their defenses in a suicide run that yanks him out of the dream before they’re done. It’s an ugly death, what they can see of it, but it’s enough.

By the time they hit topside, Arthur is already gone. Parrett is so tense, he almost looks like he’s feeling an emotion.

They wrap up quickly, reeling in the line through the hole and packing away the PASIV for later pickup. They change their clothes to give the appearance of having showered and changed, and head out without Parrett, discussing their sight-seeing schedule the next day for the sake of the bodyguards still on watch in the hall.

They part ways outside the building, each with their own private plans to leave Switzerland, with the expectation they’ll be contacted and paid later, after Parrett has made the drop to the client.

Eames has his plans in place as well, but they can wait. He has something he wants to do first. It’s not the thing to pry into the business of colleagues in dreamshare, but Eames has never been one to conform to expectations. He reasons thusly: it’s a forger’s business to understand people in their infinite variety. Arthur refuses to be understood. Ergo, Eames must study Arthur. He’s an itch that refuses to be scratched, a work of uncivil art in a bespoke suit. 

Fake IDs shoved in his back pocket, a wad of cash tucked in his front, he heads to Arthur’s hotel.

* * *

 

It’s 3 AM and they’re on the floor. All of them, even Arthur, though his sprawl is still poised, as though some part of him is anticipating a quick exit or a quicker bullet. 

He’d have a hard time with either. Ariadne’s head is settled on his lap, keeping him down in an assertive claim on his affections, or providing comfort, she’s not sure which. But there’s a hand stroking her hair in a gentle rhythm, soothing the raw edges of her nerves. He thinks she’s asleep, which may be the only reason he’s petting her, but it feels fantastic. The teetering pillars of her world are settling on new foundations, finding a new shape to be.

It’s funny that Arthur should have become one of those pillars in so short a time. 

Somewhere nearby, Eames and Yusuf are carrying on an incomprehensible conversation, rapt in obscure colloquialisms that are determined enough to be their own language. Dom and Arthur have been discussing competitors and colleagues in dreamshare, breaking down faults and analyzing strengths with a precision of vocabulary that borders on catty.

She feels like she did as a child, dozing on her mother’s lap during dinner parties, awash in grown-up conversation and knowing the utter contentment of being cared for and loved.

Arthur’s doing, that. Arthur always makes her feel safe. Protected. Not like Eames does, with that feral jackal grin that reminds everyone he’s just there for the money, and the disquieting brutality he plays at when he’s bored. Arthur is precision and elegance, form and function, intelligence and loyalty. He isn’t unimaginative or humorless, no matter what Eames says.

(She doesn’t really think of him as a brother, no matter what she says.)

“I wasn’t expecting you to do that,” Dom says quietly, after a discussion about a mediocre forger draws to its natural conclusion.

The apparent _non sequitur_ throws Ariadne, but Arthur seems to have no difficulty keeping up. 

“I wasn’t either,” he says, low, unruffled. 

“You never told me.”

“You never asked.”

“Would you have told me if I did?”

There’s a pause, while Arthur works his fingers through a tangle in Ariadne’s hair. He smells good, like he always does; a mixture of soap, metal, some indefinable quality of _Arthur_ that curls up in the hollow spaces of her chest and makes a place for itself, assured of its welcome. 

“Mal knew,” Arthur says at last. It’s not quite an answer.

“I know,” Dom says. The yearning is so obvious in his voice still, after all this time, if Ariadne’s eyes weren’t closed already she’d be turning them away out of embarrassment for him.

“She told you.” Arthur doesn’t sound surprised.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. She never promised she wouldn’t.”

Dom says, “I wish—” He cuts off on pointless dreams before they’re spoken, leaving them open to possibility. Then: “How did she find out? She never told me that.”

“She figured it out.”

“Oh.”

“She was always smarter than you.”

“She was,” Dom says, wistful. “My brain never worked that way. She’s always been better at people.”

Arthur stays silent. Ariadne knows he caught the present tense in Dom’s words, just as she did, though his hand never stops its unwearying slide through her hair.

A moment later, Dom catches up to them.

“She was,” he says again, correcting. “She was always better at people.”

“She was better at pretty much everything.”

“Thanks.”

Ariadne feels Arthur’s shrug, translated through tiny adjustments in the body beneath her. She pictures the smile she hears in his pragmatic, “Worst-kept secret in the business.”

Dom huffs what sounds like a chuckle. It relaxes the infinitesimal strain in the air until he adds, “She ... expected ugliness, so she could see it when it was in front of her face, I guess. Things like that never used to occur to me.”

Arthur’s hand stops. Under her cheek, thigh muscles tense, hardening against rich fabric. “Ugly,” he says, his voice level.

“You know what I mean.”

“Which part are you talking about, when you say _ugly_?” 

Dom snaps, “Christ, Arthur,” and Arthur says, “He—” 

“If you tell me he loved you, I’ll deck you.”

The fingers tangled in Ariadne’s hair tighten for a brief, sharp second. She can hear Arthur’s harsh intake of breath. “She really told you everything, didn’t she?” The words are unemotional. The pull on her hair relaxes; as though in apology, fingers soothe the lingering twinges of pain. 

She breathes a sigh into his hip, mumbling in sleepy forgiveness. 

Silence falls, as though Dom and Arthur are holding their breath, waiting to see if she’ll wake. By rights she should. She’s an interloper in a conversation that isn’t meant for her ears; by rights she should let them know — let Arthur know — that she’s a thief in the open, stealing his trust. She pokes at her conscience to see if it has anything to suggest. It has nothing to say. _Stay asleep_ , something else advises, so she does.

Curiosity apparently trumps conscience. Eames would be proud of her. It’s a thought that should taste more sour than it does.

“You really meant it when you told Ariadne you weren’t abused,” Dom says, his voice wondering, after a long stretch filled with nothing but the steady warmth of Arthur and the broadly accented gibberish from Eames and Yusuf. “You really don’t think you were.”

Arthur shifts under Ariadne’s head. “I’d still kill anyone who touched Phillipa and James.” It sounds like a consolation prize.

“You have any idea how fucked up that is?”

“Yeah.” He sounds resigned. “I'm not an idiot."

"No. Normally, you're not."

The pause is expectant. Eventually, Arthur says, "You could only try to hit me."

"He didn't love you. A grown man doesn't do that to an eight-year-old boy out of love."

"He was—" Arthur begins, and then stops. It's so rare to hear him hesitate over words, Ariadne has to force herself to breathe evenly, to force back the urge to ply him with words to fill that awful gap. _He was a predator. A pedophile. Better off dead._

"It wasn't your fault," Dom says, sounding tentative, like he’s not sure what his line is.

Arthur twitches, an impatient movement. "You don’t need to headshrink me. I don’t need a fucking support group. I’m fine.”

“You say that even when you’re bleeding out.”

“And am I dead yet?”

“Not for lack of trying.”

“Lack of trying? You think I don't know how to do my job? Are you really calling me incompetent, Cobb?”

“Yeah. Because I want to end up the night with my balls ripped off and shoved down my throat.”

“I’m still alive, so obviously I know what I’m talking about when I say I’m okay. Not like you and that job in Minsk.”

Dom makes an outraged sound, the beginning of a word, the fragment of an indignant reply. Then he stops. “You’re trying to change the subject.”

Arthur hums noncommittally. “No 'trying' about it. I changed the subject. You can take your own sweet time if you want. The rest of us’ll just wait for you on the corner.”

Another pause. “We’re talking about this,” Dom says, and Arthur sighs. “ _Arthur_.”

“I’m fine,” Arthur says more quietly, like he’s the one offering comfort. 

“You can’t know that.”

“And you think you know better?”

“You don’t even think you were abused,” Dom says, patience heavy across the syllables. “A grown man, a man you trusted, did terrible things to you and you think that was okay. That’s not fine. That’s denial.”

There’s an edge to Arthur’s retort. “You’d be the expert on denial.”

“Seriously? That’s the best you can do?”

“You think I was some kind of victim? Me?”

“You were just a kid.”

“He didn’t hurt me.”

“There are more ways to hurt someone than just physically.”

Ariadne can imagine Arthur’s look, flat beyond exasperation. Yusuf, irreverently, calls it Arthur’s _bitch, please_ expression.

“Well,” Dom says sheepishly.

“You don’t understand. He loved me.”

“If he loved you, he wouldn’t have molested you.”

“He didn’t molest me. He had sex with me,” Arthur says, and the dispassionate way he says it makes bile rise in Ariadne’s throat, eight-year-old Arthur helpless in the hands of a monster—

“He raped you,” Dom says, sounding just as sick.

“You’re not getting it,” Arthur says. There’s a strangeness to his voice that tugs at Ariadne’s ear; a disconnect as the nondescript accent he normally affects starts to lose cohesion, spreading out like taffy into something almost recognizable. “I wasn’t raped—”

“You were _eight_. You didn’t have the ability to consent—”

“Would you just shut up for a second? I’m telling you, I was— I was fucking _honored_ that he chose me. I was his special one. His best. I was his favorite. He never even wanted the others in the bedroom, because that was just for us.”

 _Us_ , Ariadne thinks, while Dom makes a choking sound. “There were others?”

Ariadne shifts, turning her face into Arthur’s thigh and curling her hand beneath her mouth. Pressed in the dark warmth of his body, she bites into her knuckles and swallows a flood of saliva, working back the churn of her stomach and the acid urge to vomit.

“There were a few. They came and went, but I was the one he wanted to keep. I was the one he loved.”

“How can you even— Do you even hear yourself?”

The hand settles on Ariadne’s shoulder, a solid warmth that grounds her through the thin fabric of her blouse. She clings to the feeling.

“I know it’s fucked up, but who I am right now is because of him. It was the first time in my life I ever felt special. Like I was someone important.”

“Jesus Christ. This is how pedophiles work. You know this. You remember the Marko job.”

“I brought you the Marko job,” Arthur reminds, in that slower, patient twang. It makes Ariadne’s nerves stretch taut with stress, the sense that Arthur is waiting for Dom again, waiting for him to catch up.

“Then you should remember. You did all that research, you did the debrief for the team.”

“What about it?”

“You told the client how it worked. You laid it out for him, step by step. The grooming, the Judas goat, the—” 

Dom breaks off, his breath catching.

“Oh,” he says, stricken. “Oh. The Judas goat. Oh God.” 

“I wasn’t the one who was abused, Dom.” The even voice plods through the words like they’re rote. Ariadne feels the prickle of tears behind her eyelids. 

“You didn’t mean you weren’t hurt. You think you weren’t hurt _enough_.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“This is why Hong Kong,” Dom says jerkily, it sounds like through his teeth. “Gaborone. Lilongwe. Jesus, Parrett's job in Lausanne. Is this why you followed me all this time, after— even after Mal?”

“Mal would've murdered me if I'd let you run off and get yourself shot.”

"Instead, you got shot for me. Twice," Dom retorts, flinging the words out in accusation. Arthur says nothing, framing a silence that's draped by the familiar, tattered cloth of Dom's self-blame.

Joints creak. "Arthur," Dom says deliberately. "Were you hoping I’d get you killed?”

"You're a fucking idiot," Arthur says, but he sounds lost, the jibe unconvincing. 

Fabric hisses sharply. Arthur tips forward, the butterfly arch of his ribcage pressing into Ariadne’s temple.

She opens her eyes to the pale span of his shirt, pulled taut where Dom has grabbed it; to the rasping, unsteady shudder of his respiration, staggering through deliberate breaths. In the quiet spaces between them, she can hear her own heartbeat mating with Arthur’s, dull staccato in her ears. 

“You were eight years old,” Dom says, low and fierce. “You didn’t know what was happening to you, much less anybody else. A grown man took advantage of you. You were a victim. You never stood a chance. It wasn’t your fault.”

More silence.

“Do you need me to keep telling you that until it sinks through that thick skull of yours? Because I will.”

“You’re one to talk about thick skulls,” Arthur says, sinking back as Dom lets him go. His voice is coolly amused; what Ariadne can see of his expression is bleak. 

“I think I’m uniquely qualified.” Dom’s hand flattens into a gentle press, broad against the pallor of Arthur’s shirt. “Mal would have killed you if she’d known about Lilongwe.”

Ariadne closes her eyes.

“What happened to him? The guy?” 

Arthur doesn’t even pretend not to understand. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? _You_? You’d kill anyone who touched Philipa or James, but you’re telling me the guy who raped you, the guy who _molested_ you might be walking around somewhere, destroying some other kid who can’t protect himself, and you don’t know where he is?”

If there’s a reaction, it’s a wordless one. Under Ariadne’s cheek, muscles flex and tighten.

Dom sighs. “Fuck, Arthur.”

“It wasn’t ugly to me,” Arthur says at last, sounding desperately tired.  _Wasn't,_ Ariadne hears, and buries the prickle of oncoming tears into his thigh.

After a long, painful moment, Dom says sadly, “Hindsight’s a bitch.”


	5. Chapter 5

 

Arthur isn’t at his hotel.

It’s the type of place that has a concierge. Even worse, it’s the type of place that can afford an honest concierge. He isn’t impressed by Eames’s charm or money, but does grudgingly give way to an Interpol ID. Not the best way to go about things, because it leaves memories behind, but they’re blowing this town anyway and Arthur is already gone. Gone for over a week, according to the hotel; took a taxi straight to the airport, which leaves Eames with little to go on by way of leads.

Their base of operations is already closed, stripped bare. Eames doesn’t bother to check it for any leftover clues. Both Arthur and Parrett are obsessive when it comes to cleaning their tracks.

The only possibility left is a slim one, but it’s what he has, so he uses it. Dressed in the seedier relics of his wardrobe, he returns to the mark’s hotel and loafs around the corner, where there’s a handy vantage point for the alley next to the hotel and a wedge of street in front of the main entrance. 

His watch reads a little after 4 AM. Even at this hour, there’s already early morning traffic: deliveries being made, service employees trudging to work. 

It’s 5:06 when Eames gets what he came for.

The noise comes from the alley, a narrow, dingy passageway barely wide enough for three people to walk abreast. A slim figure flies out of the unmarked service door, shoved precipitously by a lethal-looking knife of a man in a well-cut suit.

The first man -- _boy_ really, dark-haired, pale under fresh bruises, in ripped jeans and T-shirt under a thin jacket -- stumbles into the wall, hitting hard and settling his back against it. His shoulders curl defensively around his chest, arms wrapping around himself in a protective embrace as the other man hops down the stairs and heads towards him.

For a second, Eames considers intervening. He hugs the leftovers of shadow instead, feeling the shape of the gun beneath his jacket.

Something like a conversation takes place, mostly one-sided. Body language speaks where the words, that uniquely Swiss mutilation of German, are inaudible. The man in the suit does most of the talking. Despite his apparent youth, he’s coolly dangerous in the way men used to violence are, without conscious effort or the crassness of height or breadth to add drama. The boy glares at him with the scared, angry hostility of a cornered animal, too feral to know that submission is less painful than struggle.

Eames doesn’t make his presence known. The suit pats the kid on the cheek in an offhand, dismissive gesture. The boy flinches; the suit goes back into the building, leaving him behind.

After a time, after a long time, the youth uncurls from himself, stiff and awkward, like he’s feeling the aches of old beatings.

“I’d ask how much for just the hour, but I’m not entirely sure I could afford it,” Eames says, rolling around the corner to lean on the wall. The boy shies away, tense with alarm and suspicion.

Eames stills, showing his open hands. He curls up an actor’s shallow smile, lips firmly closed over his teeth. “Need a ride, darling?”

Arthur stares at Eames’s chest with tired, red-rimmed eyes, his face closed. “Cameras,” Arthur says at last, when the length of the silence has made Eames wonder whether he’s about to have a gun pulled on him. Arthur’s voice is hoarse, rasping as though it’s been damaged. 

“Where?”

Arthur’s gaze flicks aside and up; if Eames shifts, he can just make out the black, glassy eyes perched high on the wall. Arthur fumbles inside the thin jacket, moving carefully still, and pulls out a thick fold of bills. 

“Am I playing your pimp?” Eames demands with manufactured delight, though he’s already moving for the benefit of surveillance, grabbing the money out of Arthur’s fist to thumb through it. The amount is impressive, all things considered. He whistles under his breath before selecting a bill to hand back to Arthur. 

“Car’s around the corner,” he says, while Arthur snatches the lonely bill back. “Can you walk?”

Close up, the bruises on Arthur’s face are more telling. Eames can see uglier ones around his neck. “You were supposed to scatter after the job was done,” Arthur says, instead of answering. 

He’s done something to his American accent; added a softness to the consonants and leisure to its cadence that gives him an air of quaint naivete. The rent boy persona is perfectly crafted. Despite himself, Eames can’t help a twinge of professional envy. Damn the man.

He beams at him, turning with an eye for the alley entrance and hotel door. “Without getting a kiss good-bye?”

The fact that Arthur doesn’t respond to this sally is more disconcerting than Eames is comfortable admitting to. Impossible to think of him as a full-grown man in this get-up, wearing the skin of a frightened prostitute in torn, too-thin clothes. Arthur starts limping for the street, his shoulders hunched again, head bowed.

The limp is not entirely exaggerated, Eames realizes when they clear the camera's line of sight, though Arthur’s stride lengthens as though to deny its existence. Eames jacks a cheap, unprepossessing car without fanfare. Arthur slides into the passenger side and they drive for a while, Eames following monosyllabic instructions until they’re in the old city, the slums of noble buildings that have been rehabilitated by the corpses of newer ones.

They don’t speak. Eames’s customary bandinage feels ill-timed in the face of this strange, wounded version of Arthur. In the confines of the car, the smell of sex is almost overwhelming.

When they reach the decrepit apartment building that Arthur guides him to, Eames gets no invitation to come up. He goes anyway, ignoring Arthur’s strange hesitance of motion, the stops and stutters as he leads the way: across a thinly walled lobby with rat-chewed red carpet; up narrow flights of stairs that defy gravity and the average width of a human body. 

The windowless hole Arthur finally opens is little more than a closet, but it’s large enough for a bed, a table, and a single chair. It’s also large enough for two men to stand in, if one of them is willing to crowd the other.

Arthur walks in, stops at the far side of the room, then turns to look at Eames’s chest again. Not with interest. His gaze drags, as though he's too tired to to meet Eames’s eyes. 

“I suppose you want to fuck me now,” Arthur says, as though resigned to inevitability. 

It’s wrong. All wrong. 

“I always want things that aren’t good for me,” Eames temporizes, trying not to think about how he’s blocking Arthur’s only exit, how Arthur has let himself be cornered. Arthur, whose first act in any new environment is to find every exit point and possible line of sight.

Arthur shrugs, his face blank. “Whatever.”

He starts to take off his thin shirt, baring pale skin and the beginnings of bruises across his torso. For a second, Eames is tempted. Just for a second. His fantasies about seeing Arthur naked are rich and varied, and fantasy, he discovers, falls short of reality. The muscles under the bruised skin, the lithe perfection of him-- but there’s something about it, the joyless stripping, that makes irritation rise on its hind legs and whine. 

Against what passes for his better judgment, he takes the few steps forward to crowd Arthur against the wall.

He expects to be stabbed or slapped down in some ridiculously painful way, the punchline of a vicious joke. Never mind that Arthur’s sense of humor doesn’t work like that. Disquiet grows when he doesn’t get anything in response, not the slightest hitch in Arthur’s breathing. Even the pulse that beats in the hollow of Arthur’s throat is steady, as indifferent as the rest of him.

“Darling,” Eames says, pulling out his most posh accent, usually guaranteed to get a rise out of the other man. He taps the underside of Arthur’s chin with his knuckle and this, at least, makes him react. Arthur’s face tilts up towards his.

Eames has seen Arthur’s eyes irritated, amused, smiling, frowning, angry, thoughtful, fierce. Once, in a memory that he cherishes, he saw them laughing. He has never seen them utterly empty before now, devoid of life. They swallow light. He could fall into those eyes and never hit bottom, never be warm again.

He’s seen eyes like that before on street corners and behind guns, lost children dying by degrees.

Eames is well aware that he has few admirable qualities. It's not something that bothers him in the normal course of things. He's untrustworthy, mercenary, self-serving, and opportunistic. Not all his sexual liaisons would fare well under scrutiny, bordering more on the unsavory than respectable. For all his faults though, he's never had a partner who was less than willing and eager. In the face of such stoic apathy, libido slinks away, leaving him hollow and exposed. 

He swallows his unease. If nothing else, Eames is a liar, and a damn good one. He conceals his urge to cover Arthur with his jacket, instead pinching the other man’s chin lightly before stepping back to give him space.

“Maybe some other night, yeah?” he offers, letting his voice drift lazily through regret. “I have a plane to catch. Bloody Parrett could’ve warned me it was going to take this long for you to finish the job.”

He watches through his lashes while Arthur’s forehead furrows. It’s an expression at least, even if it seems more like muscle memory than actual feeling. 

“Parrett,” Arthur echoes, sounding uncertain.

In normal circumstances, Arthur would never be so easily caught by sidelong implications. Eames raises his eyebrows. “Do I look like the type to play volunteer chauffeur?” he demands. “Come on. Shower and change, mate. I’ve got places to be, people to do.”

His leer is a vulgar thing, but it’s well-worn enough that Arthur’s response to it is near Pavlovian. He relaxes infintesimally. For the first time, something akin to an actual emotion sparks in his face.

“Better offers?” he asks.

Eames has the impression that he’s being tested. Of course it would be Arthur, he reflects bitterly, _Arthur_ of all people that he decides to be quixotically chivalrous towards. Of all the men least likely to appreciate or even comprehend it--

He lifts a dismissive shoulder. “When I fuck you, it'll be with Arthur,” he declares, making it light and inconsequential: the twirl of a proverbial mustache, the wink of a flirtatious eye. At Arthur’s blank stare, he clarifies, “Not a rent boy, though hold that thought. Might be nice to try, after the test drive.”

Arthur glances down at himself at that, assessing his own half-nakedness with remote curiosity; like it’s a worthless oddity he’s picked up on the street, a knickknack with an unimpressive provenance. Eames feels the urge to grit his teeth, but reminds himself that he’s a pro. His tells aren’t blatant unless he wants them to be.

“How did you land the mark?” he demands, reminded. “He picks a different one each night.”

Arthur stirs, his arms drifting in a teenager’s disjointed awkwardness. “He prefers fresh meat and he’s competitive. I paid a man to hit on me, and then looked scared of the john.”

The implications of this are unpleasant, taken in conjunction with the bruises that Arthur is unselfconsciously sporting. “And the PASIV hook-up?” Eames asks, quelling unwelcome thoughts. “How’d you get the security to leave?”

Arthur’s mouth shapes a smile that leaves the rest of his face sterile. “I didn’t.”

Eames stares at him, picturing with more detail than he’d like Arthur naked and unarmed in crumpled sheets, insinuating the line into the mark’s arm under the very eyes of men who would torture and kill him without a second’s hesitation. There are a multitude of things he could say. _Are you insane? Do you have some kind of death wish? No job is worth...._

Arthur closes his eyes, his face wiping clean as he settles his weight. Some indefinable quality changes, the ragged edges of him meeting in a perfectly tailored seam: a coat closing over bare skin. “Get out,” he says, his soft rentboy accent entirely gone, once more the perfectly self-possessed point man. His eyes open, cool and direct. “I’m going to take a shower.”

Eames stares at Arthur for a minute longer, struck with the sudden realization that he might have been admiring the wrong forge. 

Arthur tilts his head. “Unless you’ve changed your mind about fucking me.” 

Teeth snapped hard around the acid of suspicion, Eames turns hard on his heel, and leaves. 

&

Yusuf announces, “Arthur’s outside.”

Eames, in the midst of making a martini, pauses to quiz him with a raised eyebrow. “I wasn’t asking.”

“I just thought I’d mention it. He’s outside,” Yusuf says, then adds with emphasis, “alone.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Only if you think he’s going to kill himself.”

“Oh my God,” Ariadne blurts out, and turns white.

The best Eames can muster is a snort. “He’s not going to kill himself.”

“Are you sure?” 

“Hypothetically--” Yusuf tries, only to be quelled by an eye roll and Ariadne’s vengeful fist against his bicep.

The chemist makes sad, doe-dark eyes at them. “Not even hypothetically,” Eames reassures Ariadne, which generates another solid punch to Yusuf’s arm. Yusuf winces, not even trying to hide how pleased he is by the attention.

“Good girl,” Eames congratulates.

“Thanks.” 

“Well,” Yusuf says, reluctant to abandon a titillating line of speculation.

Eames pours out the martini and gives it to Ariadne, under the theory that intelligently applied violence deserves positive reinforcement, even if it weren’t its own reward. “He’s not going to kill himself.”

“Then it isn’t a problem,” Yusuf announces, tearing his adoring gaze away from Ariadne’s blush, “although if I wanted to get into his pants as much as you do, I’d consider it an opportunity. ‘Thank you,’ I’d be saying. ‘You’re a good friend.’ And you’d be saying, ‘Of course, Yusuf, you realize you owe me one now,’ and I’d be saying, ‘Anything your heart desires, mate--’”

“A bit mercenary in this scenario of yours, aren’t I?”

“It’s one of your best qualities,” he’s reassured, and Ariadne says, “Oh my _God_ ,” again, this time in stunned epiphany. “Eames. Were you serious all this time? You and Arthur. That would be so hot. Can I watch? _Eames_.”

Armed with that thought, he goes out onto the balcony, where Vegas is sprawled out like a cheap hooker beneath them, and Arthur is standing framed by the Palazzo’s lights. Eames has the thought that Arthur looks like a museum piece: exotic, expensive, eminently desirable.

He’s immediately disgusted with himself, because if the comparison wasn’t adolescent enough, the heavy-handed alliteration is enough to make a man weep for sheer embarrassment. “Wanted a fag,” he excuses, at Arthur’s acknowledging turn of head.

“We call them cigarettes in the states.” It’s not even disapproving, which is Arthur’s default state over Eames’s choices, whether they be sartorial, grammatical, or professional.

Eames can’t quite convince himself it’s because Arthur is softening towards him, but there’s something to be said for making hay while the sun shines. 

“I’ll settle for one of those, then,” he says.

Arthur’s mouth thins, but it’s in a repressed smile that pinches at his lips and hints at the dimple. He’s not a smoker by habit, but of course he has a slim cigarette case he can fish out of the pocket of his suit coat, thrown carelessly across one of the balcony chairs. There were times before Lausanne that Eames suspected Arthur of being a caricature of himself. After Lausanne he’s certain of it, though he’s less sure about just how ironic the 007 polish is meant to be.

He doesn’t have a chance to search out his lighter. Arthur is there before him with a silver one of his own, one hand cupped around a flame. Eames shoves the cigarette between his lips and bends his head to it, realizing only after Arthur has gone still that he’s grabbed Arthur’s wrist to keep the lighter in place.

It’s an effort not to jerk back, jarred by the feel of skin on skin. What is casual among other people feels unbearably intimate with Arthur. Eames forces himself to finish lighting the cigarette before he lets Arthur go, the sense of his attention sharp enough to be painful.

“Ta,” he says when he’s done, and raises his gaze to meet Arthur’s before slowly, deliberately, letting him go. His fingers trail across the point man’s wrist, prolonging contact.

The light is too mixed to tell whether Arthur is blushing when he retreats, but at least he’s radiating confusion, not offense. Arthur doesn’t get angry over unknowns.

Not that there’s much to be confused about from half the length of the balcony away, when he’s eventually blocked by a wall. The gap is good for Eames too, though, so he doesn’t comment on it. The rush and thunder of blood under his skin is exhilaratingly foreign, a tingle at physical proximity that he hasn’t felt for, dear Christ, _years_. 

“Yusuf thinks you’re going to kill yourself,” he volunteers.

This draws an incredulous sound out of Arthur. “Why?” he asks.

“Probably the only way he could think of to get Ariadne’s attention.”

“She’s out of his league,” Arthur says without pity. 

“Interested yourself?”

The crinkled look Arthur gives him is a mix of bewilderment and affront. Something unforgivable happens in Eames’s chest; he shoves it away before he can identify it. 

“You’d make lovely babies together,” he says instead. “They’d be chic, have perfect skin, and be absolutely mad.”

“As long as they’re chic.”

“Your priorities,” Eames reproaches, though he finds nothing wrong with them, and then can’t quite throttle the chuckle when Arthur raises a judgmental eyebrow. 

The subject drifts by natural stages to the job they shared together in Johannesburg, both of them relaxing over the impromptu post mortem: a barely competent extractor; an inexperienced architect; an anxious client. They migrate from the balcony edge to settle on the long-armed chairs, the conversation effortless in a way that Eames almost never experiences with Arthur. It’s a thing of late night and alcohol, when things that are kept locked away are cut adrift and rise close to the surface, and Eames could happily live forever in this half-breath between confession and concealment. 

Eventually, the conversation tapers to a natural lull, the space between them still echoing with the idle trade of thoughts without barbs, humor without an edge. 

It’s a restful quiet, forgiving and rare. It’s Arthur that breaks it.

“You can ask if you want,” he says.

Eames doesn’t risk this tenuous harmony of theirs by pretending not to understand. It would be an insult to both their intelligences. “Not sure I particularly want to, mate.”

“Yeah?” Skepticism drags Arthur’s vowels into blandness. “You’re not curious?”

It’s uncharacteristic enough of him not to pry that to not ask draws more attention than to ask. He shrugs. “Who was it?” he asks, for that reason alone. “Father? Relative? Priest?”

“Coach.”

Eames puffs out a cloud from his second cigarette and lifts his head. “Football? Ah, Americans-- soccer?”

“Little League.”

“Baseball?”

Arthur’s silence is agreement.

“How long?” Eames asks.

“Just a summer.”

 _Just_ , thinks Eames, and has to force his voice into a disinterested, “Beats my record, mate. Longest relationship I had was two months.”

Arthur chuckles, a short, hard sound like the rattle of dice. “I’m impressed. How’d it end?”

“Threw my stuff out a window and called the cops on me. You?”

A beat. “I don’t....” he begins, then stops. “I don’t remember.”

The admission costs Arthur, the words simple but the voice raw. Eames lifts his chin to bare his throat to the dry desert air, closing his eyes in case he’s tempted to look at Arthur and see more than he’d be forgiven for. “Must’ve been a heartbreaker, then. Some of my best breakups are the ones I was too pissed to remember.”

“I was eight years old. You think I got drunk off pixie sticks and Coca Cola?”

“A man makes due. Or an eight year old, if you like.” Eames lifts his drink in a sloppy toast. “You’re the versatile type. I have faith in wee little Arthur.”

There’s a smile for that; he can hear it in the discouraging, “‘Wee’ _and_ ‘little.’”

“It’s my language, I’ll misuse it if I want to, mate. English belonged to the British before you Colonials came prancing along to fuck it all up.”

Arthur snorts. “Git.”

“Jerk.”

“Rotter.”

“Dick.”

“Wanker.”

“One of the best in the business,” Eames says modestly. “If I do say so myself.”

Arthur actually laughs. It’s a short-lived thing but it’s beautiful nonetheless, and Eames finds himself saving the sound into his favorite memories, the ones he draws on for his best forges. “And here we are,” he says aloud, idly. “Count the ways I’m fucked.”

The questioning hum from the other chair is undemanding, so Eames doesn’t supply it with an answer. Too soon. Too new. If he’s willing to be honest, too fragile. 

“You could’ve kept it quiet,” he observes, blowing the question across the lip of his glass. “Kept it to yourself, yeah? Nobody would’ve ever known.”

Arthur hums again, noncommittal. 

“You’re going to play it that I drove you to it? I’m not that annoying.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit, Mr. Eames.”

“Modesty’s one of my greatest failings, Arthur.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” Arthur says in grave acknowledgment.

“I’ll save you a spot by Saint Peter,” Eames says, cracking his neck, “but we both know you never do anything you don’t damn well mean to do.”

He can feel Arthur studying him in the dark, the pause before he speaks thoughtful, as though he’s fishing the answers out of his own questions. “I wanted to know what it felt like to say it,” Arthur says at last. 

Eames opens his eyes at that. The stars are invisible against the glare of Vegas spreading her legs for the sky. “Was it everything you dreamed of?”

“He was the only man,” Arthur says dreamily, inconsequential, absent-minded, “the only man I’ve ever loved.”

There’s nothing to say to that -- nothing Eames will trust himself to say -- so he says nothing.

“Are you going to tell me how he raped me, and lecture me about it?” 

Eames blows a cloud of smoke up into the light-washed night. “Did he?” he asks.

“I know the difference,” Arthur says conversationally, and Eames looks over at him, at the loose, deceptively relaxed length of him picked out in gold against the shadows, gorgeous and perfect and dangerous as love. “He never made me feel that.”

“At least there’s that, then,” Eames acknowledges with false boredom. Joints creak in his fist, wrapped safely out of sight around his glass.

“At least,” Arthur says, and then says with a regret that’s all the more terrible for its being unsentimental, “I was luckier than I deserved, I guess.”

Eames looks at the sky and thinks hard about how much he’s had to drink, how much Arthur has had to drink, how he should get up and go back inside again because the metal-framed chairs aren’t doing any favors for his back, no matter how posh the cushions are. 

He doesn’t think why Arthur is telling him about a man whose slow and painful death would be favor to the rest of the world. He doesn’t ask, but Arthur answers anyway.

“Because you don’t give a fuck,” he says, like it’s a fact 

Eames smokes his cigarette, imagining the satisfying smash of skin breaking and bone shattering under his knuckles. After a moment, he says, “I suppose I don’t.”

&


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally, I was going to have this finished by now on the basis of weekly (more or less) updates. Then work sent me overseas for a month* on one day's notice. I got back home a few days ago with a new wardrobe, a binder of expense reports, flu, and severe misanthropy, so in my lucid moments between coughing up my lungs and hating humanity, I'm trying to finish editing the rest of this story so I can post it. Since work is sending me out on the road again in two days, I'm not hopeful this will happen unless my destination works out in my favor. I'll either end up in Hyderabad or Hong Kong. Guess which one would work out in my favor. Go ahead. Guess. Hah. No. WRONG. NEITHER OF THEM WILL.
> 
> TL;DR version: updates unavoidably delayed. Sorry. Appreciate your patience, folks. The hatred of everything is strong in this one.
> 
> In the meantime, have some delirious, mostly unedited, and completely unplanned stupidity I wrote on my phone while high on jetlag and secondhand smoke in Milan. Story arc planning, not so much a thing with this.
> 
> _* Edit to add: fine, it wasn't quite a month. IT MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN. There are things coming out of my lungs that look like they were produced by an unholy marriage between Crayola and the Silly Putty people, Treet, and you are a terrible, unsympathetic, horrible friend. I can dramatize my pain if I damn well want to. Stop mocking me and bring me a goddamn respirator._

 

They find Ariadne in the ridiculous six-man boat the Venetian calls a bathtub.

Dom is hugging the toilet, more out of biological necessity than emotional attachment. It’s an edifying sight for someone who might still be harboring a grudge, so Eames takes a few minutes to admire the effect before prying him free to drag him out of the bathroom. Arthur waits outside until they’re out, his frown abstract, his face tight and tender.

“I need to tell Arthur,” Ariadne mourns, skidding forlornly around on the porcelain and splashing in purely imaginary water. “It’s not my business. I shouldn’t have yelled.”

“It’s fine,” Arthur tells her, reaching down to fish her out of the tub. “Time to go to bed, Ariadne.”

Ariadne flails at him, connects a few gentle thwaps to his face, then paws his hair in a clumsy effort to make amends. “Oh God,” she slurs. Her eyes well over. “I hurt you. I want to die. Why aren’t I dead? Eames, Eames, did you and Arthur have sex? Was it nice?”

“Lovely, pet,” Eames reassures, over Dom’s horrified protests. 

“I didn’t get to _watch_.”

“Next time,” Arthur says without apparent concern, climbing into the bathtub with her to lift her out in approved bridal conveyance style. She clings to him, her face buried into his neck, mumbling adjectives of adoration into his skin while he cares for her with all the efficiency of a trained nurse.

He’s practiced enough at it, so seamless in his shift from one practical task to the next, that Eames makes a few more easy deductions about Arthur’s past. It’s past five in the morning, and the sky is already taking on the sickly hue of pre-dawn clashing with neon. Arthur moves like it’s the beginning of his day rather than the end, his body tireless even if his face gives it the lie.

“We have tickets,” Ariadne tells them around the aspirin he’s is forcing on her. She bares the kitten pink and red of her mouth in an enormous yawn as she curls into pillows. “ _Cirque, cirque, cirque du, cirque--”_

Since her alcohol-enthralled brain seems to be trapped on a ridiculous magic roundabout, Eames provides, “ _Cirque_ _du Soleil?_ ” 

Ariadne points a triumphant finger at him. “ _That_ ,” she enunciates. “All going later. Tomorrow. Tonight. Later today. Then dinner. Wake me up. Seven o’clock. _All_ going.” A frown crinkles her face. “You too, Arthur. Bondage ‘xperience.”

“Bondage. _Arthur_ ,” Eames exclaims, thrilled.

The frown digs deeper. “Bon-ding,” Ariadne says carefully. 

Eames’s face falls. “That’s just cruel, pet.”

“And then we drink more!”

“Oh good. Because we need more of that,” Arthur says, smoothing a gentle hand across Ariadne’s forehead. 

The frown lines relax; she closes her eyes with a contented sigh. “Don’ judge,” she mumbles, Dom declares, “I’m not going to throw up,” with the careful dignity of a supreme court judge, and then they’re both asleep, Dom hugging Eames around the hips, his face buried someplace really awkward.

“I need a picture of this,” Eames announces.

Arthur’s phone goes _click_.

A few minutes later, Eames has dragged Dom into the bedroom, but left him curled up on the floor with a pillow and a blanket -- more, in his opinion, than the extractor deserves, really -- but the bed is big enough for four sleeping adults, or three frisky ones: the Venetian is determined to give its patrons every opportunity to be grateful for Vegas’s motto. Yusuf, at least, is game to be one of the somnolescent four. He burrows his way past Eames to crawl into the bed, eyes squeezed shut to avoid Arthur’s disapproving glower.

If it’s a question of protecting Ariadne’s virtue, Yusuf has Arthur pipped at the post. The chemist arranges himself like a manicured corpse, hands folded primly on his stomach, and essays a pointed snore.

“One of the better ideas he’s ever had,” Eames admits, shoving at Yusuf’s body to move him over. He claims the space that’s made, sinking into the mattress with a sigh of relief. “Grab the other side, Arthur. Plenty of room.”

Wordless, Arthur studies the picture of them on the bed as though judging them for their lack of aesthetic value. Then he herds Ariadne over, giving himself the side nearest the door. Even with his eyes closed, Eames can identify each sound. The hiss of fabric as Arthur shrugs out of his waistcoat; the snick and click of metal as he checks his gun, then slides it under the pillow. The dull rustle of sheets as he settles himself. Then nothing.

Fatigue drags Eames down. It’s a pleasant lassitude, lacking the urgency of real exhaustion or anxiety. Yusuf beside him is a comforting, familiar warmth; they’ve drunk down the moon more than a few times in their loosely defined friendship. 

Silence falls. Minutes tick by.

“Eames?” Yusuf whispers.

Too lazy to make an effort, Eames pretends to be unconscious.

“Arthur?”

Fabric rustles. There’s nothing sleep-befuddled about Arthur’s voice. “What?”

“Listen,” Yusuf says urgently, and then stops. There’s a rustle, then the scrape of metal: the gun being withdrawn from under the pillow.

The silence sharpens, attentive.

“I don’t hear anything,” Arthur says at last.

“What?”

“Did you hear something?”

“What?”

“You said ‘listen,’” Arthur says slowly, articulating each syllable with deliberation, bless his cranky little heart.

“Is he dead?” Yusuf asks.

This time it’s Arthur’s turn to be confused. “What?”

“Is he dead?”

“Who?”

“You know.”

It takes a moment. “Eames?” Arthur asks at last, sounding more exasperated than alarmed at the possibility.

“No, the fucker who did you. You know.”

“Oh. Him.” A beat. “I don’t know.” 

“If you decide to go after him.” The mattress dents under Eames’s ribs; Yusuf sitting up, his wrist digging into Eames’s hip. “I’m always good for a job.”

“A job,” Arthur says after a long, pensive silence.

Yusuf must make some gesture, mimed something comprehensible beyond the reach of Eames’s hearing, because a second later Arthur is translating aloud, “You mean a _hit_ ,” with such lack of expression, it can’t be anything but surprise.

“I can give you drugs to make it look like an accident. I can make it painful and slow, and _still_ look like an accident. I can make him die screaming and clawing his own eyes out. I can make his nuts shrivel up over the course of days and then fall right off.”

“Good to know.”

“Just say the word,” Yusuf says brightly.

“Cold-blooded murder is three words,” Arthur points out, persnickety bastard that he is, and Yusuf says with drunken _bonhomie_ , “Eh, it’s a living. For me, anyway. Not for the other guy. I wouldn’t do it for just anyone, but you--” the happy, hopeful smile is audible, “--you’re a friend. I’d do it for you, mate.”

“Out of friendship.”

“And cash, although a wire transfer is also acceptable. I have expenses. Chemical compounds don’t just fall out of trees.”

Another beat. “You’re a good friend.” 

“I am, yeah?” Yusuf is self-congratulatory. “Not everyone would do what I’d do.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“So whenever you get around to it. Call me.”

“Okay.”

Yusuf shifts in place. “So do you think me and Ari--” he begins.

“No.”

“How about you and--”

“No.”

“I’m fantastic in bed. I can give you testimonials and references. They’re all women, but how hard could it be? I’ve been practicing on my own equipment for years.”

“No.”

“Did you and Eames really--”

“No.”

“If you ever do,” Yusuf says hopefully, “can I watch?”

Arthur's reaction is inaudible, but apparently effective. Yusuf slumps back down on the bed. Silence falls. Eames thinks about sleeping.

At least until Yusuf sits back up. “I have chemicals that will make a man’s dick swell to four times its normal size,” he announces with pride.

There’s a pause. Then the shift of a body rising from the bed. Leather creaks; Eames opens his eyes, turns his head, watches Arthur holstering his gun.

“Just call me,” Yusuf offers. “I’ll take a five percent cut on my usual fee.”

Arthur walks out of the room without a word, the stiffness of his carriage a silent scream.

“Ten percent?” Yusuf calls after him.

Eames stares up at the ceiling. In the distance, a door closes.

Yusuf pokes him in the ribs. “Eames. Eames? Oi, you awake? Should I give him a bulk rate discount?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back in town and finished the post in the prompt, but I hate the ending I originally wrote with a passion, so don't read it unless you're desperate for crappy closure. It is undergoing rewrites. Note to self: find a beta, good God, do I need one.

It’s going on six o’clock in the evening. Somewhere in Las Vegas, Ariadne is losing what is left of her alcohol-addled mind. Eames’s phone buzzes with the latest of her increasingly frantic texts.

_Where the fuck are you? The Cirque show starts in one hour. Are you with Arthur?_

He pauses long enough to count out the syllables, and is impressed to realize she has in her fury managed to construct a perfectly American haiku.  He texts back,  _You have a poets soul,_ because _s_ ometimes his sense of humor borders on the unreasonable.

Ariadne’s retort -- _I hope a pit bull rips off your testicles and eats them_ \-- lacks poetic nuance, but at least it’s a model of clear communication and possibly even spelled right, which is a pity because it’s an effort that’s completely wasted on him. 

The club is called ‘Hush,’ and Eames is only there by accident, if you can call it accident when you’ve deliberately tailed someone into it for the second evening in a row. It isn’t the kind of club that Eames would have pictured Arthur visiting of his own accord, the gaudy decor meant to be futuristic but instead achieving a plastic aquarium effect with twinks playing the part of clownfish. Still, there he is, a predator in shallow waters, leaned against the bar and looking more expensive than all the other patrons combined. Since Eames is immediately hit on by a slag whose makeup maps the psycho-sexual evolution of David Bowie’s career, this isn’t saying much.

He drifts through the club, stealing a drink from an unattended table to look like he belongs, and positioning himself on the periphery of a group so an observer would assume he is part of it. The clownfish are swarming, darting coyly in and out of Arthur’s personal space with more courage than self-preservation. Eames counts four he wouldn’t mind shagging himself, though Arthur barely spares them a glance. They have, between them, a total of three hours of sleep, but the debauched, mad-eyed look is handy for protective camouflage in Vegas, which seems to prefer its visitors at their worst. In Eames’s opinion it does special favors for Arthur, who exudes danger and a preemptive hostility that’s irresistible. 

Eames’s phone buzzes in his pocket and he checks it again, reading, _Bonding time! We were going to bond! At the circus! Seriously, where the fuck are you?_ from Ariadne, followed by a pathetic, _I don’t like clowns,_ from Dom.

Across the club, Arthur pulls out his own phone to inspect its display. A few seconds later, Ariadne’s text is answered by an inquiring, _How do people bond at the circus?_ from Arthur, damn this phone and its inadequate group text notifications.

_We could have perved over ponies and Russian acrobats or something! What are you and Eames doing? Why aren’t you here?_

Arthur’s head snaps up almost immediately. Eames has just enough time to slide behind a group of out-of-town bears before the frowning, suspicious stare hits his section of the club. He can’t help the twinge of fondness. Of course Arthur would immediately assume the worst. If it weren’t for the fact that there is _no love in the world_ great enough for Eames to let Arthur think he’s right about him, he would step out into the open right now to prove that he will always, always exceed the worst expectations.

As it is, he texts a flippant, _Might b late on a roll at Cesar_ back; and then, because he knows it will make Arthur’s face scrunch up into that adorable expression of outraged professionalism, tacks on some gratuitous emoticons. _:) :) :) :) !!!!!_

Since there’s no chance that this will convince Arthur that Eames is safely huddled over some poker table, Eames stays safe behind his over-bulked shields for a few more minutes, pretending to drink while his vibrating phone tries to give him a hard-on from his front pocket. 

By the time the bears move on, Arthur has let go of suspicion long enough to engage with one of the clownfish. It’s a lovely specimen of the type:  slim, young, dark hair streaked with brilliant blue and silver, studs and shiny rings marching up the shell of his ear. He’s innocent and fey in one delicate, delicious package, and he’s wearing a fedora. It’s the same clownfish Eames watched Arthur walk out on last night in this same club, and Eames can hardly fault either of them for their taste. Eames would fuck Arthur. Eames would fuck the clownfish. Of course, given opportunity and motivation, Eames will fuck anything, so this is maybe not much of a compliment.

“‘Hello, fishy. Sorry about the other night,’” he murmurs into his borrowed drink, watching the dark heads bent together in conversation. “‘‘No worries. Care for a shag, you gorgeous, deadly thing, you?’ ‘What a brilliant idea. Let me just call my mate Eames and we can make it a threesome. You should see his dick. It’s massive. God’s gift to the bedroom, and the things he can do with his tongue--’”

Regretfully, he decides his lip-reading efforts are more optimistic than accurate. There’s nothing lascivious about Arthur’s expression -- though there should be, he thinks self-righteously, because his dick is magnificent, which Arthur would actually know if he’d ever bothered to take him up on his offers of first-hand experience. 

The pair of them draw away to sit at a booth, huddling together in artificial privacy. At one point, Arthur’s little playmate passes him a manila envelope, which he shoves back across the table without opening. Eames immediately burns with the need to know what’s in it, and hates Arthur a little for apparently not even caring enough to look. Arthur isn’t doing much of the talking, though he’s certainly doing the lion’s share of grim-faced brooding. It’s a good look for him, distracting enough that when he finally does get up to go, Eames barely has enough time to make himself inconspicuous before he’s spotted. He catches a glimpse of white-pinched lips, that particular set to Arthur’s frame that means he’s spoiling for a fight. Eames gives himself a second to pity the next hapless idiot to catch Arthur’s attention, and another second to regret not being there to enjoy the show when it happens.

Ah well. He’s got other fish to fry.

It only takes him only a few seconds to roll up his sleeves, open his collar, and steal a suit jacket and tie from the seat back of a crowded table. The tie goes around his throat, unknotted; the jacket he drapes over his arm. It suggests enough to paint him as a tired businessman, white collar with a rough edge. He orders a drink from the bar, sips enough of it to dampen his lips, then makes his play.

The young man slides out of the booth, his attention on settling his fedora. Eames bumps into his back and stumbles. Scotch splashes all over the stolen jacket. 

Eames says, “Fuck.”

Dark eyes widen at him, comically shocked. “Oh my God,” says the mark. His voice is light and bright, a match to the rest of him. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you. Are you okay? Oh my God, your suit.”

“Damn. I guess I’ll need to find a dry cleaner after all,” Eames says, in his plushest BBC accent. The mark glances up at him; Eames licks drops of scotch off his hand, then sucks provocatively on his knuckle because he has no shame and Ariadne is absolutely right about him being a bad, bad man. From the instant flood of color on the mark’s face -- and how entertaining is it that Arthur has a friend with a blush reflex? -- the lack of subtlety is working just fine.

“I’m so sorry,” the mark says, almost shattered by remorse.

It’s cute, really. Eames grins at him, setting the damp glass on the table of the booth. “No need to apologize,” he reassures, still lapping at his hand with languid, lavish strokes of his tongue. He lets his eyes betray interest in the other man, assessing his attractions. “It was my fault. Though if you’re really feeling badly about it, you can buy me a replacement drink. Or at least let me buy you one. Nothing sketchy, I promise,” he adds, when the mark looks uncertain. “I could just use some company in a strange country. The second your boyfriend comes back, I’ll be out of your hair.”

“My boyfriend?”

“The bloke in the suit you were with earlier. Sorry.” He lets the grin slip a bit, rubbing at his hair in feigned embarrassment. “That sounded creepy. I couldn’t help but notice. You, I mean, but you were with someone, so....”

“Oh,” the mark says. Then he blushes some more. “Not my boyfriend. He was a friend. I mean, he is a friend. Not a boyfriend. Not-- I mean, he’s a friend who’s a guy, but he’s not, we’re not, oh my God, I can’t stop talking--”

Eames chuckles; the mark winds down, and after a minute smiles back with bewildered wonder as though the fact of someone like Eames noticing him, offering to buy him a drink, is too incredible to be entirely believed. 

Eames knows that look. He loves that look. It makes the con so much easier.

“Talking’s good. I like talking, to start with,” he says, wiping his hand on the jacket to offer it to the other man. He accepts it in a slim hand and Eames tugs gently to reel him closer, just inside the bubble of his personal space. “I’m Dom. Dom Cobb. And you are--?”

Dark eyes stare up at him from under the fedora. “Eric Preston.”

“Nice to meet you, Eric. I like your hat. You look lovely in it.”

“You like it? I got it just yesterday from Neil. Him, I mean, my friend. The friend who’s not my boyfriend.”

“Do tell,” Eames says, and smiles.

 

&

 

The club’s bathrooms aren’t as clean as they might have been, but they get rough usage, so really they’re better than they could be. Good enough for what Eames needs them for, anyway, and conveniently stocked with liquid hand soap and paper towels. He walks away from the club with Eric’s blushes, a satisfied hum under his skin, and a manila envelope the younger man isn’t yet aware of having lost (hopefully because his mind is more pleasantly occupied with the things Eames taught him over the course of fifteen illuminating minutes against the stall door. Eames is a giver.)

Of course Arthur is waiting two blocks away, which gives Eames ten minutes and half a mile more than he expected to get. Arthur makes his presence known in his own inimitable way, with a fist to Eames’s kidney. It’s a low blow in more ways than one, but Eames is quite sure he deserves it so can’t really be annoyed.

“Arthur,” he puffs gleefully, when he’s been smashed face-first into a brick wall and had his picture taken by a group of excited tourists. “If you wanted our first time to be rough, all you had to do was ask.”

Arthur’s body is pressed up against Eames’s, pinning him against the wall. If Eames had more dignity, he would deny that he’s giggling, but he can’t be fussed with that now.

There are more flash bulbs. The fist clenched on the back of his collar twists hard. 

“No need to bash my head in the wall,” Eames coaxes. “I’ll come clean, officer. I’m a bad man. I deserve a spanking. It’s your civic duty to stop me in my downward spiral into a life of crime and sordid sex.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Arthur says through his teeth, frustration bleeding off the words. 

“Are you being a dog in the manger?” Eames demands, twisting his head to grin sidelong and unrepentant at Arthur. “I didn’t think you were the type. You see how every day is a learning experience?”

“I’m not--” Arthur’s body jerks away, disappointingly, but Eames is released so he takes advantage of it to turn and face him, close enough that their lips would touch if he leaned forward with intent to tongue. 

“I can’t say I don’t admire your taste,” he congratulates, which is true enough. “I promise I didn’t traumatize him even a little bit. Smile for the tourists, Arthur. They think you’re mafia.”

He tries to make himself look cowed and in fear for his life, which prompts still more camera flashes and not a single shout for law enforcement. God bless America.

Arthur doesn’t smile for the tourists, because Arthur is a killjoy. What Arthur does do is wrap his hand around Eames’s shirt front and drag him off the main strip towards some kind of drugstore. Eames thinks about shrieking for help, because that would be funny, but decides against because Arthur looks like his sense of humor might have retired early for the evening and also:  _drugstore_. It’s less crowded there, if marginally less so. A couple of the tourists look inclined to follow them out of atavistic curiosity, but Arthur’s scowl cows them into looking for their fun elsewhere.

“Are we going to buy condoms and lube?” Eames asks hopefully. He has a pocketful of the former -- one less than he started the night with now -- but it never hurts to have extras.

“Idiot,” Arthur snaps, and shoves him towards a small recess beneath one of the stone crosswalk bridges that knit the Strip together. “What the fuck are you doing, Eames?”

“ _Who_ , darling, not what. And he was charming. Melted on the tongue like those little Andes mints, what’s the line—”

Arthur’s mouth flattens. “Shut up,” he orders, and Eames finishes out of sheer bloody-mindedness, “—tastes great, less filling,” while he wonders if trying to lick Arthur’s lips now would get him punched in the dick or just shot, and where those options would stand on a normal person’s risk vs. reward meter. 

“You followed me to the club,” Arthur says grimly. “What. Are. You. Doing.”

“I could ask you the same thing. You forgot something there. Aren’t you lucky I happened to stop by?” Eames congratulates, fishing the manila envelope out from his waistband. Arthur looks at it with loathing, as though Eames is offering him a pair of flip-flops to wear with his Rubinacci tie.

“Not like you to forget something,” Eames observes.

“You could’ve remembered that before you decided to pick Eric’s pocket.”

“How would I have found out what was in it if I didn’t look?”

“You looked?”

“Of course I looked.” He’s vaguely hurt. It’s like Arthur doesn’t know him at all. “It was adorable. I wouldn’t have wanted me looking at it if I were you, but nobody asked me.” Tiny Neil McCormick in his Little League uniform, eyes dark, face pale, mouth pulled in a smile as hollow as a paper bag; the child in the photograph has only the most incidental relationship to the man in front of him, overwritten and recreated since then by who knows what in between.

Eames isn’t a sentimentalist. He wasn’t much interested in young Arthur. All of his attention was for the adult in the piece.

Arthur plucks the envelope out of his hand and turns it over in his own, his fingertips fussy on the paper as though attempting to avoid contamination. 

“That’s right. Should’ve said,” Eames remembers, watching those hands. “What’s the phrase? I’m sorry for your loss.”

Arthur goes still. 

“As enjoyable as it’s been watching you flop around like a landed fish, I feel it behooves me to ask,” Eames adds, “What the fuck are you up to, Arthur?”

The fact that Arthur doesn’t say anything is a kind of answer, as is the way he turns away with a hand in his pocket, the other dangling the envelope between two fingers like he doesn’t really give a fuck whether it falls or comes with him. His pause is long enough to be an invitation for Eames to accompany him, as though Eames needs an invitation or would even pay attention if he didn’t get one. 

Nothing but us civilized men here.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to saviors of the day, [Faieance](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Faieance/pseuds/Faieance) and [Sibilant](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sibilant/pseuds/Sibilant), who kindly did beta service and wrestled a chapter that was honestly and truly horrendous into something halfway decent. Basically, if there is sense, logic, decent English, and pacing here, it's because of them. I take full responsibility for the crap--pejorative and figurative--that remains. 
> 
> One more chapter left. I am working on it, I _swear_.

 

By and large, there aren’t too many civilities between dreamspace criminals, but there are some rules that are well-defined. Favors are for life and death. Nobody has a past. Always pay a percentage upfront. 

Never lend Eames money.

The job in Córdoba isn’t a problem in and of itself. The job is fine. It isn’t anything they haven’t done a dozen times in the past, in one form or another. Eames is there as an extractor for a change, and he has no concerns about the mark: in and out, done and done. It’s not the job that makes him jittery, that makes his neck itch like a hedgehog is rolling around on his back. It’s the fucking client.

They need a point man, in Eames’s opinion, and out of sheer masochism he’s persuaded Arthur to come on board. That both his professional and his libidinous opinions happen to align is pure chance; a happy one insofar as he’s concerned, though less so from Arthur’s perspective. Politicians are treacherous at the best of times, more so than the criminals or corporations they’re all used to dealing with. Eames is half-convinced that the client will arrange to have them all killed before they get paid, which is reason enough for him to demand forty percent up front. In Arthur’s opinion, he should have asked for sixty. 

“Why did you take the damn job?” Arthur demands after he’s arrived and declared their base a deathtrap and the coffee undrinkable, too prickly to be appeased.

“Why did you?” Eames lobs back. His good mood is magically restored when Arthur simply glares and shuffles in place, refusing to answer.

Arthur’s qualms are only slightly soothed when he gets the guns Eames bought him, though he criticizes Eames’s care and feeding of them, as though they’re temperamental show dogs and Eames is on a PETA watchlist. He spends the first afternoon meticulously checking, cleaning, and loading them, a pastime that involves too much slick oil and pale hands caressing cold black metal than is good for Eames’s mental health. The rest of the time Arthur spends terrorizing the architect, Parthika, who’s heard about Arthur but never worked with him before. Watching Arthur dismantle her protozoan outline and teach her the intricacies of paradoxical architecture is enough to make Eames go boneless, his professional paranoia fuzzing behind a screen of white noise.

It’s not like Eames to get so distracted during a job. He’s survived living on the outer boundaries of prudence by not letting down his guard—or at least making sure his perimeter was clear before he did. He has history in Córdoba—some friends but more enemies, and a few humorless creditors he pawned off with a smile and a disappearing act. So there’s no excuse for him not noticing the two man tailing him; much less stepping into a tiny store without being sure there was another exit.

It’s all a bit embarrassing.

He wakes up with a headache, the taste of blood in his mouth, and the disheartening certainty that he didn’t acquit himself as well as he could have.

“Well,” he tells the bleary afterimages of pain. “This is a pretty cock-up.”

There are others present; he can hear the shuffle of feet. Hands haul him onto a chair, ungentle about it. He cracks open a swollen eye to inspect his situation. There are three in the room, not counting him. One of them has what’s probably a broken nose.

The sight wakes ugly satisfaction in Eames’s gut. He would do something to make it worse, given opportunity, but there’s at least one gun in the room, and it isn’t his. There’s nothing casual about the way its owner is holding it. Eames is a betting man, and personally, he’d bet that he’s fucked. It’s not much consolation to reflect that a smart businessman doesn’t kill everybody who owes him money. 

A smart businessman kills one or two people who owe him money, and lets the rest fall in line.

“Lausano, mate,” he greets their regrettably familiar leader. He attempts a grin that’s bloody in more ways than one. “I was just heading over to find you.”

“To pay me my money, I suppose,” says Lausano, obviously unimpressed, and Eames can’t help a hacking chuckle at the man’s expression, how much it looks like Arthur’s just after Eames has said something outrageous.

“Not fucking likely,” he admits. His cheek feels hot and wet. He touches it, the back of his hand coming away red. 

Lausano’s mouth spasms. “Funny man,” he congratulates. 

“A funny man waiting for a payout on his last job,” Eames clarifies, on the off chance that it will postpone certain foregone conclusions: i.e. violence; i.e. violence done upon his person. “One that should be enough to cover what I owe you.” He reaches into a pocket, pausing with wide-spread fingers as the gunman jerks his weapon in warning. Slow-motion, then. He reaches into his pocket to produce his handkerchief. 

The gunman relaxes. Eames dabs at his face with the cloth, unobtrusively palming the handful of coins he pulled out with it. In a pinch, they’ll do as a distraction. Maybe.

“It’s a large debt,” Lausano says.

“It’s a large payout.”

“Smaller after you pay twenty-five percent interest.”

Eames fakes a smile. His knuckles ache with strain. “You wouldn’t consider three?” 

“A funny man,” Lausano says again, smiling in an unpleasant way.  It takes no special perception to recognize the signs of the impending violence. The casino owner stands, brushing his hands over his suit, and fixes his tie. “The last time you were in town, I missed you.”

The last time Eames was in Argentina it was for a surface job, not a dreamspace one, and it was a clusterfuck of a thing. He’s done smarter things than work with an ex-girlfriend on a heist. “Ta. If I’d known you’d take it this personally, I’d have made time to drop in.” 

“The last time you were in town,” Lausano says with great precision, arranging his cuffs, “my nephew was shot dead during an art theft.”

Eames’s heart skips a beat. Then it starts to race.

“Sorry to hear it,” he says, with real regret. He lets his gaze flick around the room, alighting briefly on the two other men on its way towards the exit. Both of them are dimly familiar. There’s nothing in the room that could serve as a weapon. Fuck. “Not Raolo? I liked him.”

“Raolo,” Lausano confirms, then shows his teeth. “As you know very well.”

There’s no point in denying it; Lausano has his fingers in a lot of pies, and Analise was predictably quick in making a deal before their wheel man Franco could. It’s a matter of public record now. Eames says frankly, “It went ‘round the twist from the second it started. I wasn’t the one with the gun. There wasn’t supposed to be one.” 

“This gun, on the other hand, is supposed to be here.” Lausano snaps his fingers at his bodyguard, who passes him the revolver. He points it at Eames. 

“Let’s not be hasty,” he says, jerking away in the chair. Beneath it, his feet dig hard into the floor. “I can’t pay you if I’m dead.”

“I can swallow the financial loss.”

“It’s a lot of money.” Eames grips hard at the edge of the seat, getting ready to spring. There are too many calculations ricocheting in his head, speeding up to the beat of his heart. Look to one side to feint, jump the other direction, take a bullet in the side? Maybe. Right hand grab and jerk to overbalance Lausano, throw coins in the face of the nearest bodyguard, swivel behind Lausano and pull his arm up to fire—

The door behind Lausano opens without warning. Arthur is standing in it, pale, his face set in bleak, grim lines.

Eames’s brain hiccups. His fingers twitch for his totem. 

Arthur. Fucking Arthur _._ Arthur and his—his beautiful, black, bloody _brilliant_ gun.

Arthur looks at them. 

They look back.

“I’m here for Mr. Eames,” Arthur says.

Lausano’s weight shifts, his gun hand turning towards Arthur, and Eames—

Eames lunges before he’s finished thinking through the stupidity of it, his shoulder hitting Lausano in the ribs so they both go ass over teakettle, possession of the gun up for grabs between them. The bodyguards lurch into motion, their feet pounding just by Eames’s head. The crack of Arthur’s gun is deafening in the room, but it does whatever it was meant to do. Out of the corner of his eye, Eames catches a blur of blue. One man down. The second shot is a belated echo of the first, punctuated by a curse and thud.

There’s more to pay attention to, but Eames wrenches the gun away from Lausano and scrambles, crab-like on hands and feet, to join Arthur near the door. The bodyguards are on the ground, one bloody and swearing, the other simply unconscious. Lausano is getting deliberately to his feet, hot-eyed, his attention fixed on Arthur’s gun.

Normally, Eames has mixed feelings about guns outside of dreamspace. This one time, he has no such qualms. Lausano he leaves to Arthur; he focuses his own stolen weapon on the other two, his hand steady, his lungs shaking.

“Eames will pay you the amount he owes before he leaves the country,” Arthur tells Lausano. Eames opens his mouth to interject some witticism, giddy with exhilaration, but Arthur adds without any change of expression, “I personally guarantee it,” and Eames has heard _that_ voice before. He shuts his mouth.

Lausano, unfortunately, has never had the pleasure. “Payment is no longer enough,” he says stiffly. “Mr. Eames was responsible for the death of my nephew.”

“I wasn’t,” Eames counters immediately, affronted. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Arthur’s frown. His voice is too loud, too fast. He forces it down. “That was all Franco, and he’s paying his debt to society.” 

“The Austrian embassy robbery in ’08?” Arthur asks, his frown deepening. “You were on that?”

“It was a favor for Analise. In my own defense, it was a beautiful little 18th century piece. De Wit. You know how I feel about the Dutch.” 

Arthur’s eyes narrow on Lausano.

“Analise had nothing to do with his nephew’s death?” Arthur demands.

“No. Franco even confessed in court that it was all him. Analise and I didn’t even know he had the gun.” 

“Anybody else involved?”

“No!” Eames declares, only to cave like a wet house of cards when Arthur gives him a direct look. “We might have gotten some help from Carlo.”

“Carlo?”

“Balding guy, bad breath. You remember, from that thing in Cuba. He might’ve assisted a bit.”

"Might have?"

"Accidentally. As a security specialist." Eames looks as apologetic as he knows how. "For a ten percent cut?"

Arthur stares at him. He says, “Eames,” in an odd, clear voice. “Eames. You _fucker_.”

Then he shoots Lausano through the head.

Cold-blooded, motherfucking _son-of-a—_

“Run. _Now_ ,” Arthur snaps.

They run.

Eames spends the first great gasps of furious breath on an indictment of Arthur’s sanity and intelligence before saving the rest for a time when Arthur might actually be listening. The bodyguards don’t pursue them—their employer is dead, and with him their motivation—but they move fast nonetheless, spilling out of the building to plunge into the market crowds. With Eames’s battered face and blood-speckled clothes, they stand out like pimples in the crowd until Eames manages to filch an open bottle of water off an outdoor cafe table. He washes his face as they go, getting rid of the worst of the filth. After that it’s just a matter of folding over his shirt front, snagging a new jacket off a display rack as they pass, and tossing his old one in an open bin.

Arthur finally slows down when they’re about a good mile and a half away. Eames takes the opportunity to drag him into an alleyway. The look he gets is indignant, but he’s past caring; he sucks in a breath to begin the rant he’d crafted while they’d been running, only to be cut off by:

“Analise, Franco, and Carlo are dead.” 

Derailed, Eames frowns. “What? When?”

“Last month.”

“Accident?”

“No.”

“All of them? Really?”

Arthur doesn’t bother to answer.

It’s possible that Eames should feel more— more _something_ given the news of an ex-girlfriend’s death, but Analise had been a back-stabbing cow outside the bedroom, and Franco and Carlo hadn’t been anything to write home about, either. He won’t pretend that he’s a better person than he is. His predominant emotion is a baffled surprise that Arthur would keep track of his ex-girlfriend. “Lausano ordered the hits?” 

“Yes.”

“You sure?” 

“Yes,” Arthur says tersely, and for the first time Eames realizes that Arthur’s pallor hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s gotten worse the more monosyllabic Arthur has gotten, or maybe it’s vice versa. There’s an unhealthy tinge to it that Eames recognizes from too many mornings after spent staring in the mirror: a faint quiver to the edges of Arthur’s mouth, a bowing, braced tension to his shoulders and back.

“Arthur,” he says, eyeing him. “You’re looking a bit green, love.”

Arthur makes a curious gulping sound, presses the back of his hand hard to his mouth, then darts for the back of the alley. Eames prudently waits where he is. A few seconds later, he’s treated to the sound of Arthur being sick behind a stack of damp cardboard boxes filled with garbage. It’s like hearing a cat cough up a hairball, though Eames is intimately acquainted with the five stages of post-tequila Kubler-Ross, enough that he can recognize the choking for what it is, if not necessarily the cause for it.

For dignity’s sake, he lets Arthur deal with his nausea alone. When Arthur emerges from the shelter of the boxes, Eames is leaned up against the wall with a new, clean handkerchief and a sealed bottle of water.

Arthur doesn’t ask where they came from. He drinks some of the water and accepts the handkerchief with a shaking hand to wipe his mouth. His color is better than it was, but only just, and Eames opens his mouth to make some flippant comment about Americans in Argentina, Arthur’s bad choices in takeout: drinking on the job, mate, and you call yourself a professional?

What he says instead is an incredulous, “You’ve never killed anyone topside before.” Which is too ridiculous to be believed given Arthur’s reputation, surely.

“Not in cold blood,” Arthur admits. It’s a fine distinction, one that Eames understands fully. It’s a micrometer of difference, but one that’s chasms deep, the border between being a good man, bad man, and all the strata of self-delusion in between. 

“He would’ve killed me if you hadn’t gotten him first,” he offers.

Arthur doesn’t look comforted. If anything he looks even more wretched, his usual composure torn open to lay bare the orderly ranks of thought behind them. They’re not so orderly now, chasing themselves whirligig through self-recrimination and revulsion. 

Eames is conscious of the shame, rare these days, that he used to feel in his first baby steps towards the man he is today; from a time when he’d given away some unexpectedly precious piece of himself, breaking off the best parts of the man he was and giving it away until there was nothing left but soiled drabs and dregs. He feels the same now, but turned inside-out and backwards, conscious of his unwitting responsibility in Arthur’s first murder. He’s never dealt well with guilt. “Let’s have it, then.” 

Arthur gives him an odd look. 

“Come on. You’re dying to say it. ‘If you were a professional—’ that’s how it starts, yeah?”

“We should get back,” Arthur says instead, his voice raw from stomach acid. He still looks sick, a poor facsimile of himself. 

Eames opens his mouth on a sharp retort but closes it again, swallowing words like stones. He’s had a lot of debts in his time. He’s only had a handful where he felt like he owed someone.

“Yeah,” he says thinly, and slumps back to rest onto the wall, wincing from injuries that don’t actually exist. It takes an effort to force his muscles to unknot, but he manages it. Enough to slump in bone-deep weariness, less a pretense than admission. “Gimme a few, yeah? Lausano’s men worked me over a bit. I wasn’t feeling it until now. Other things on my mind.”

Arthur cocks an eyebrow at him, unable to entirely hide his relief.

“I could use a rest. Ten minutes? Bar across the street. Don’t know about you, Arthur, but I could use a drink.”

Normally, this kind of malingering would prompt a sharp word or a glare. Arthur looks down at the drink in his hand, the slop of water shaking in the plastic bottle, and tucks it under his other elbow so he can shove his emptied hand into his pocket. He meets Eames’s eyes defiantly.

“Ten minutes,” he concedes.

Parthika’s curiosity is intense when they return to the job site, but Arthur is uncommunicative—meanly secretive, just as he was when they first met. Eames, sullen and dragging in the fall after the adrenaline high, buries himself in work and tea, avoiding eye contact with Arthur for the rest of the day. It’s a quiet evening. By the time Arthur leaves for the night, the calm of routine has restored Eames’s equilibrium. Even better, his sense of humor has returned. Parthika makes no move to leave so he stays back as well, and only waits for the door to clang shut behind Arthur before he he leans back in his chair, stretches, and says aloud, “Fuck, I need a drink.” 

That’s all it takes to reel her in. 

The version of the afternoon he tells her, the two of them huddled over shots of fernet, gives a brief nod to truth and then leaves it penniless, fucked out, and unconscious in the parking lot. It’s a masterpiece, if he says so himself. It adds an extra badass luster to Arthur’s reputation, in a backhanded _thank you_ that Eames doubts Arthur would care about. The sense of obligation is no less, but Eames is conscious of its weight adjusting in his mind, rewriting itself to something less frightening, something he can work with.

The job ends without further excitement. The authorities aren’t overly concerned with Lausano, whose body mysteriously never shows up—Eames pointedly doesn’t ask Arthur about it—so at least there’s that. 

It’s a year before Eames sees Arthur again. The story he told Parthika has worked its way around the world since then, and is recounted to him by Parrett’s new architect the day he arrives in Milan. “Did you hear about our point man?” Sunita begins. Eames is entertained to discover that his own name has been tastefully redacted, though Arthur’s has remained central and grown exponentially more terrifying. The story itself has ballooned enough in the retelling that he only barely recognizes the skeleton of his original tale.

“What’s so funny?” Sunita breaks off to demand, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Just thinking of something,” Eames apologizes. “Ten men? Really? Christ, where does Arthur keep all those knives under his suit?”

It’s another half-year before he works with Parthika again, and she’s done enough jobs by then to be considered a veteran. It’s their chemist’s turn to be the neophyte, an ex-pharmaceutical researcher who’s so new he squeaks when he turns around too fast. Eames gives him a lazy grin, warns Parthika that Arthur is coming in fresh off a job in Hong Kong, and ambles out after catching a glimpse of the chemist’s huge eyes.

As he leaves, he hears her tell the boy say sternly, “Rule five. Whatever you do, _don’t_ cross Arthur.”

 

* * *

 

It isn’t until they walk through the suite door that Arthur says, “Fuck if I know,” and by then, Eames has gotten so distracted by the excellent tailoring of Arthur’s pants that he’s almost forgotten the question.

The envelope slaps onto the coffee table. Arthur heads straight for the newly refreshed bar. Eames drapes himself in an inviting fashion across one of the armchairs, one knee hooked over the plush arm on the off chance certain people will notice how the pose pulls the fabric of his pants across his crotch. “So how’d he do it, then? Your friend,” he supplies, at Arthur’s inquiring look. “What’s his name.”

“Brian. Brian Lackey.”

“Bullet to the head? Razor blade in the bathtub? Rope over the rafters? Hold on, there’s a movie like this. Tim Curry, wasn’t it? Clue, that’s the one. ‘Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick.’ I liked that one.”

“Carbon monoxide,” Arthur says flatly. “His dead mother’s car in the garage.” 

Glass clinks. Arthur glances a question; Eames raises a desultory pair of fingers. Yes, please. Ta. 

“He dressed himself up in a suit first,” Arthur adds, splashing a generous amount of whiskey into two glasses. “The asshole bought it with the money I sent him.”

Eames raises a skeptical eyebrow at him, a question without words: Generous Arthur? They’ve worked together often enough now that Arthur answers the thought, rather than the unspoken words. 

“Sometimes. I thought if he got out of fucking Kansas—“ Arthur shrugs.

Since the envelope is tantalizingly in arm’s reach, Eames stretches just far enough to snag and drag it closer. Inspected again, the picture is just as drearily wholesome as it was the last time he saw it. He’s interested to find that his memory of the coach’s face is almost exact, practically line-perfect—the kind of recollection he reserves for forges, or long-con marks—while his memory of young Neil is faded and dim. The names scribbled on the back of the photo are a quick read. He finds the one he’s looking for, then flips over the photo again to count heads until he finds the boy.

Round face. Round glasses. Pale hair. Vacant expression. Unremarkable in every way. Eames tries to imagine him as sexually desirable, and fails utterly. Tries to put himself into the mind of a pedophile— 

Arthur’s hand cuts in between him and the photo, dangling a glass between his fingertips. “Thank _fuck_ ,” Eames breathes, and clutches at it.

“We were funny-looking kids,” Arthur observes, standing over him to look down at the rows of young boys and the single standing adult, twice their size.

“Cute,” Eames counters, using his finger to pat the head he dimly recalls as being Neil’s.

From Arthur’s snort, he takes it that he’s missed. “Vulnerable,” Arthur amends, and not as though it’s an improvement.

“Don’t really see the appeal in kids,” Eames admits, after making a half-hearted guess at another crouched figure. “Big eyes, small heads— We evolved to look vulnerable so adults would feel protective towards us and not smash our heads in with bricks when we annoyed them.” 

“What keeps me from smashing your head in when you annoy me now?”

“Bricks are too heavy for your wee stick arms?”

Arthur’s face takes on a look like he’s rethinking the merits of head-smashing, so Eames points out hastily, “Not the important point.”

“Is there one?”

“Did you know I was following you?”

Arthur rolls his eyes.

Eames lifts a finger. “But you didn’t warn me off.”

“When have you ever listened to anything I say?”

“So you wanted me to learn about Neil McCormick,” Eames pursues, ignoring him. “You might not’ve planned for me to find out about your dead mate, though you should’ve, and maybe you didn’t plan on me shagging your friend, though again you should’ve—“

Arthur looks martyred. Eames widens his eyes. 

“—Or did you? Was it for— Arthur, was I a _hostess gift_?” he demands, briefly enchanted by the idea of Arthur pimping him out to his little friends.

“I wouldn’t wish you on my worst enemy,” Arthur retorts.

“There are all kinds of things you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Good company, good conversation, good looks, good sex, just to take four of the many services I provide.”

“Are you suggesting that you’re something I’d give someone, Eames?”

“You make me sound like an STD,” Eames objects, which makes Arthur’s mouth twitch into something not quite a smile. Eames smiles beatifically at him. “Darling. Dearest Arthur. When are you going to come right out and ask us to do a job on your coach? Or are we going to play chicken until you give up and admit you want to hire us?”

Arthur doesn’t deny it, though he hesitates a telling second before admitting, “I haven’t decided.”

“Did you want to see our resumes?”

“On the job,” Arthur clarifies, and that’s something anyway; at least he’s admitting there’s an end game, something more calculated. He moves to sit on the near end of the settee, his elbows settling on his knees, his hands loosely clasped around his glass. “You wouldn’t have liked Neil McCormick. He was a prick.”

There’s a rare frankness to Arthur’s assessment, though the words themselves aren’t so different than other judgments he’s laid out for Eames’s benefit before. It’s typical of the man that he’d apply the same blunt force to his own past that he would to a mark’s. “Arthur,” Eames says, unable to keep himself from sounding fond. “If that’s meant to be an example of how you’re different from your old self—“

Arthur’s shoulders jerk in a single shrug of amusement. “He was a different kind of asshole,” he amends. “He was vicious and useless, had friends he didn’t deserve, and treated them like shit. Brian was just— he wasn’t even a friend. He was old business who just showed up at the right time, with the right question. He ended up Eric’s friend because I wasn’t around to answer his questions, and Eric was—“ Arthur exhales into his drink, discomfort crumpling at the corners of his eyes, “—a good guy.”

A strange epitaph for a living man. “Is there supposed to be a preposition after that description? ‘Good _for_ ,’ for instance. He’s only fair to middling at blowjobs.”

“Good _at_ ,” Arthur says crossly. “Good at taking in fucked-up people and screwing himself over trying to help them.”

“He wanted you to do a job for his mate?”

Arthur’s swift glance is difficult to read. Eames slouches under it. “He wanted me to have the picture.” A nod of the head, unnecessary, indicates the photograph. Eames drops it back on the table, where Arthur glowers at it, the corner of his mouth turning in a hard curl. “Brian left it to me in his will.”

“Sentimental of him.”

“Eric thinks looking at it will give me closure,” Arthur says, and Eames, unthinking, laughs for a second before he subsides with a baffled, “Oh. You’re serious.”

Arthur sighs. 

“This is why children shouldn’t get their psychology degrees from Hollywood. That’s bloody adorable.”

“Shut up.”

“ _Closure_ ,” Eames marvels. 

Arthur frowns, more in consideration than in displeasure. “Would you do it?” 

“The job?”

“If you were me,” Arthur clarifies. “Would you do a job?”

“You’re asking me if you should do an extraction on the man who sexually molested you? As opposed to just killing him, say.”

Arthur just looks at him. 

He gives himself a count of five to consider, knowing that there are no right answers; that equally, there are no good answers, either. “Sure.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“I can think of a few reasons,” Arthur says dryly, and Eames acknowledges the point with a shrug. 

“If you’d pay me to do them, I’d be happy to talk you into a number of bad ideas. That’s not what you’re asking for though, is it? My opinion isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

Arthur doesn’t answer.

“Do you want to do a job?” Eames asks, curious. He’s seen people do stupid things after a death, reminded of mortality or opportunities lost, or seeing the road not taken like in the fucking poem. He’s done some of those stupid things. Given his vast experience in that area, he should have the wherewithal to recognize whether it’s a stupid thing or not that Arthur’s contemplating, but he’ll be damned if he can tell.

Arthur blinks into his glass, his eyes blank. “The thing is,” he says, while Eames wrestles with the disconcerting _déja vu_ of recognizing the child in the grown-up’s face, “I think I’m scared.”

The confession itself isn’t the surprising thing. When your footprints have become indelible milestones in another man’s lucid dreams, boundaries get redrawn into strange and tenuous lines. It’s the tiny smile that flutters at the corners of Arthur’s mouth—the shadow that mars what should be, could be, laughter lines—that hooks sharp and painful into Eames’s chest.

“You should be,” he says, turning his gaze aside to avoid meeting Arthur’s.

There’s a pause. “That’s not what I expected you to say.”

“What were you expecting? ‘Walk it off?’”

Another beat. “Something like that.”

Irrational annoyance spikes. “Then why the fuck would you tell me to begin with? If you’re hoping that I’ll bully you into doing this job—“

“I wasn’t. You just—”

“I am capable of being a decent human being from time to time,” he snaps, and is startled by his own sharpness. More flippantly, he tacks on, “Well, I’m capable of acting like a decent human being, anyway. I’ve forged enough of them to know how to play the part.”

“I know.”

“It’s fine to be scared,” he says, then lets his eyes slide shut. Darkness feels like privacy, feels like confidentiality, feels like intimacy. He can feel Arthur’s gaze on him. “I’d be worried if you weren’t.”

“I am capable of being an actual human being from time to time,” Arthur retorts. “Well, I’m capable of acting like one, anyway.” 

“I don’t think your problem is that you’re not human enough. I think it’s that you’re maybe a little too human.”

“That’s my problem, is it? I thought you took issue with me being an unimaginative robot.”

“‘Unimaginative stick-in-the-mud’ is the wording I usually use. If you can’t remember the text, you shouldn’t be quoting the author, Arthur.”

“Thanks for the correction.”

“It’s not so bad,” Eames consoles. “If you were as perfect as you wish you were, you’d be too bloody boring to talk to, much less want to shag.”

He wins a sound of amusement for that, and isn’t that a laugh, that he’s scoring himself on Arthur’s smiles like an infatuated teenager? Eames shifts in his chair, feeling his pulse throb in his temple. He massages it, feeling the air stretching too finely between them, thinning enough that his jaw aches with resonant strain. 

The cushions rustles. Shadows move across his eyelids. He feels Arthur standing over him, close enough that his proximal heat makes his skin prickle. Eames keeps his eyes closed; lets his head tip back to rest against the chair’s padded rail as though Arthur’s gaze isn’t a weight pressing him down.

“Would you do the job if I decided to do it?” Arthur asks, curious.

He gives it a moment, as though he doesn’t already have an answer ready to hand. “Job’s a bit simple to be needing a forger, isn’t it?”

“Extracting just names wouldn’t need a forger. It wouldn’t be complicated. But if I wanted to—“ Arthur trails off, then resumes, the consummate professional once more. “I could extract him by myself, maybe with Dom’s help, if I needed to get just names. Just the two of us. Maybe three.”

“Architect, extractor, runner,” Eames counts, lifting a hand sight unseen to count off the tally on his fingers. He opens his eyes to find Arthur looking somewhere above him, past him, uncertain. “If you were just going to extract names.”

“It’s a lot to ask,” Arthur says after a moment.

Eames can’t help a snort. “To forge baby Arthur and seduce a pedophile? Bit of an understatement, yeah?”

“The pay—“ 

“That’s not the point, and you know it.”

Silence again. Then: “Yeah, I know.”

Eames has never been one for sympathy. Empathy is the crowbar in a forger’s bag of tricks, but sympathy lives outside the bag, in foreign territory. He admits he’s too self-centered for it. He might want to feel sympathy for Arthur now, otherwise, though there’s nothing of weakness in Arthur’s face; only a tired emptiness that’s more ancient than it should be. And Eames should let it go, he really should, because he’s a selfish bastard with the occasional line he tries not to cross, but sometimes—well, sometimes it’s Arthur. And Arthur is nothing but a minefield of lines, a plotted map of orderly latitudes and longitudes that Eames wants to rip apart and roll around in until they’re smudged beyond recovery. 

“Do you really need to see what happened, Arthur?” he asks gently.

Arthur shrugs. His shoulders are rigid, braced against rejection. At some point, Arthur became damnably easy to read—or maybe he’d always been, and it was Eames who made things too complicated, mistrusting something too honest to be entirely believable. 

He grimaces. “I suppose there aren’t many people you’d trust with this, are there?”

Arthur frowns. “I trust you.”

“You’ve always had the worst judgment when it came to people.”

“I trust you,” Arthur repeats, the bloody-minded prick. He tilts his head. “I trust Dom, I trusted Mal. I trust you.“

It hurts, how damnably naive Arthur can still be. 

Arthur looks down at him. “Eames—“ he begins.

“Seducing someone as a kid, that’s a new one,”  he interrupts hastily, pretending he hasn’t heard. “I might like the challenge. God knows, seducing you as myself is hard enough. You don’t know what you’re missing, darling. I have a beautiful dick. It would go so well with your Armani.” And maybe he should be worried about how quickly his mind moves from seducing a pedophile while wearing a child—while wearing Arthur’s skin, no less—to seducing Arthur while wearing his own, but he is what he is, and there’s no apologizing for that. Arthur seems to find nothing wrong with it.

“You’re ridiculous,” Arthur says. Eames has just enough time to register the tone of his voice as bemused—as _fond_ , even—and then he’s being straddled, his thighs spanned by the stretch of Arthur’s thighs, his chest warmed by the press of Arthur’s palm. 

Eames gapes at him.

“I’ve had a lot of sex,” Arthur murmurs in his ear, shifting forward so his hip aligns with Eames’s feebly groping hand and fills it, the crest of bone maddeningly perfect under expensive fabric. “A _lot_ of sex. I’ve had more sex than the rest of you combined, I can guarantee it. I’ve had sex with dozens of men. Maybe even hundreds. I’ve fucked and been fucked, fisted, spitted, blown—“

It may be that Eames whimpers at this point. He’s half hard from Arthur’s voice alone, a low, intimate, sandpaper-rough thing he’d rub up against if he could. He’d close his eyes at the feel of Arthur’s inner thigh brushing up against his erection, but he’s a little terrified to in case that’s what Arthur’s waiting for—that one unguarded moment, in which Arthur will drive a knife under his jaw right up into his brain. 

“Are you going to stab me in the throat now?” he demands, honestly wanting to know. 

“ _Ridiculous_ ,” Arthur huffs, and there’s no mistaking his intentions now—Eames sucks in a paranoid breath; it’s definitely some kind of trick—but then there are fingers threading through his hair, dragging his head back.

And Arthur kisses him.


End file.
